IMS will tell you if you need other help first, which will save you from spending too much on our services

There are a lot of situations out there that facility managers and engineers face that really don’t have a solution. There are a lot of water damage issues, efflorescence, things like that. It’s quite common. Just about every building has this kind of damage of one type or another. There are people out there that will say they can fix it when in truth it is a structural issue and not an issue that a restorator can fix. Quite often an engineer or a building manager, they don’t want to hear that. They don’t want to hear that a restorator can’t fix it, but as restorators we can treat one of six sides of the stone. There are six sides to every stone and we can only fix one of them. We know what a restorator’s limits are. If we cross the line and you have a structural issue we’re going to tell you that.

I can give one example of a building in downtown Dallas regarding flamed granite. Flamed granite is a textured surface and a lot of people don’t realize it but it is very susceptible to moisture damage. It’s pretty easy with flamed granite to get moisture between those crystals, and flamed granite is notorious for developing water rings and when moisture gets inside it turns many shades darker than it should. A lot of people don’t quite realize that’s what they’re looking at, but it is so very common, especially in areas where you have fountains. Almost invariably you can see darkening around the fountain where moisture is migrating its way through.

Several years ago we had a potential customer who had not used us before but was familiar with our reputation. They had me come out to evaluate their flamed granite floor. And the first thing I said was, “Well, you have a lot of water damage.” Her initial reaction was, “I know! The janitorial company, they use too much moisture. They mop it too heavy every night and every morning I come in and I lift the mat by the front door and there’s water underneath it. They’re mopping it too quickly and they are throwing it right back down without letting it dry.” I quickly said, “I don’t think that’s the case.” Of course in her mind that made perfect sense. That’s what’s going on, of course it is.

I explained to her, “No, it’s not possible to have this much moisture in the stone from mops alone, They would have to virtually flood the floor every night. The effects like this they only occur from long term migration and it’s migrating under the stone, not on top of it. This moisture is not introduced from the surface. It migrates from all of the setting materials underneath the stone and what I did was I took out my moisture meter and I showed her the pattern where the leak was actually coming from. So you could almost draw a map on paper with my moisture meter because the light turns red where it’s wet. It can read moisture pretty deeply. Now it was a totally clearer picture to her, so I explained to her that this is not being caused by the janitorial company, first of all. Second of all, we cannot restore this or make it look right until you have some structural work done. You need to have this fountain fixed first because it has pretty major leak and we just showed the general area where the leak was coming from.

So she took my advice and she called someone to fix the fountain first. Rather than throwing a lot of money at us thinking that this is something that we could fix, we quickly got to the real problem, and we do this almost every day. We got to the real problem. She got the people to come out and fix it over a period of six months and the granite naturally dried, that’s how long it takes whenever moisture is that deep, it’s beneath the stone and the setting material. Then we were able to do just a very simple clean and seal whereas before she was looking at some pretty major restorative work. There’s one example of where our brutal honesty didn’t quite make sense to the customer at first, but with just a little bit of effort and a little bit of education she was able to see that we were being honest with her and not pulling her leg. We led her in the right direction of getting her stone fixed.