Can Marble Showers Be Regrouted?

November 9th, 2009 by Grout Guy

If you have a marble shower, you may want to have the grout replaced. But since marble is different than ceramic, will regrouting work on marble??

The short answer is yes; marble tiles can be successfully re-grouted and add years of life to the shower or bathtub shower. In the Boston area where we work, we’ve worked on hundreds of marble showers over the years.

There are a few special concerns, of course, but not too many, so let’s show what they are:

1. Normally tile installers use unsanded grout for marble installations, with fairly skinny grout joints, maybe 1/8 of an inch or less. This is the kind of grout that works well with regrouting – sanded grout with fat joints is much, much more difficult. If you’ve had a shower installed with much fatter joints and the grout feels rough and scratchy to the touch, that’s going to rule out regrouting, since there’s too much damage to the wall during the sanded grout removal process. If you’re not sure, don’t feel bad. It’s not always easy to tell one from the other.
2. Since most marble scratches fairly easily, the contractor doing the work has to be more careful to avoid having his tool slip and scratch the tile. Of course, you always want to be careful, but even more so with marble tile.
3. With most ceramic tile, the grout sealer we use after the process does little to help seal the tile itself, mostly the grout. But with marble, the stone itself is also porous, not just the grout. So the marble itself benefits from the sealer. This makes sealer application even more important than with a ceramic or porcelain tile shower.
4. When cleaning the marble shower, it’s important to use a cleaning product that has absolutely no acid in it. When we clean the tiles before grouting, we make sure the product we use is non acidic so no acid etching happens with the stone. Even with lots of sealer applied, marble still can etch if exposed to acid.

Those are the items that we think of when someone wants a marble shower regrouted.

Can it be done? Absolutely!

If you’re in the general Boston area and you’d like a price quote on the cost of regrouting a marble shower, all you need to do is fill out this handy dandy form below and we’ll instantly email you one immediately, so you don’t have to wait to get the pricing. If you’d like to move forward and get the work done, all you need to do is email us back and say so or you can just call us at 617-500-9271 and we’ll schedule it on the phone if you prefer.

Don’t worry – we’ll take very good care of your marble!