Sealing granite countertops – step by step.

It’s no secret that natural stone including granite is porous to some degree. This may allow liquid to penetrate the surface and leave a stain. To prevent that from happening we use a sealer. But after some time the sealer will wore off, especially in places where countertop are use more heavily. What do you do then?

How do you reapply the sealer?

Do you do it yourself or somebody has to came and do it for you? Is it expensive? These are the questions that we are going to answer today.

I want to reseal my manager’s office table. And even thought it probably won’t see food, there might be a chance that it is going to see coffee spill, maybe two during its lifetime. So, we are going to seal it.

Before we seal the granite, we need to clean it.

And to do it, I used natural stone cleaner.  I sprayed the whole surface and wiped it out. I had to let it dry out completely, before I started sealing. I had to wait a couple of minutes to let dry the countertop out.

Most sealers working the same way and the directions to use are similar, but always read the directions on the back bottle. I have put sealer in the spray bottle. This helped me distribute the sealer evenly across the whole surface. If you don’t have empty spray bottle you can put a small amount of the sealer onto the surface and spread it around with the brush. But the spray really helps a lot so I recommended that method.

I sprayed the whole table down with the sealer. What was our next step? Well, you probably wanted to wipe it by paper towel. And if that is what you did, you did it wrong. What we were doing here it is basically trying to get the sealer to penetrate the stone, get absorbed by the stone. And then let it clog up the pores why as it dried up not to let anything else in. By wiping it down with very absorbing paper towel, you are taking the sealer from the surface into the towel and throwing it out. So basically I was going to set the whole thing for about 15 to 20 minutes. The stone was going to do all of the work for you.

After that our table should be still wet, which means that all of the sealer that could was absorbed into the stone. Let just dry it off, just the excess, with a paper towel. And you sometimes may get like a sly haze effect on the surface but don’t worry about that we could clean it by paper towel.  It is a good idea that let it dry completely over the next few hours.

How often do I need to reseal my stone?

Well, that depends on the stone itself. In this case we have granite, which should be resealed by about 2-3 years. With marble that is going to be a little bit more often, about every six mounts to a year.

How expensive is resealing countertop?

Well, a quart of the sealer should last you for 200 – 400 square feet of countertop surface, and it cost about $40. So it is far less expensive that new countertop in case of not removable stain on unsealed countertop.