Limestone is the perfect choice of flooring for many rooms in the house. It's durable, it's relatively cheap, it's mould resistant, and it's easy to clean as well. For many people, limestone ticks all the boxes - that is until scratches suddenly start to appear on the limestone. This is bound to occur sooner or later. When your kids drag their toys across the floor, when your pet pooch leaves claw marks in the living room, and when you forget to take off your heels when you enter the house. But encountering scratches on your limestone floor is no need to panic. Here's how to be rid of them and make your floor look as good as new.

Scratches on honed or polished limestone.

There are various types of limestone floors, and one of the most popular is a honed or polished floor. With this type of flooring, the limestone has been intensively sanded down to create a smooth and shiny surface. With this kind of flooring, you want it to look sleek and polished at all times, so scratches are a problem. Fortunately, scratches can be easily sanded away. You'll need to purchase macro-grit sandpaper to blend the scratch into the surrounding stone. Start with a paper of 400 grit and work your way up bit by bit to 600 grit paper. This can be done by hand, or if the scratch covers a larger area, you can rent a palm sander that will work over the scratch mechanically.

Refinishing large areas of blotching.

When the scratched area is especially large, for example, from a sofa that has been dragged across a floor, this is called blotching. When you use the above method to smooth out a larger area, there will still be the appearance of an uneven blotch across the stone. You may want to pass this off as a natural flaw of the material. But if you are working with polished limestone, you probably want to achieve a smoother finish. In this case, you'll need to rent a two handed disc sander, but this does take some expertise to operate.  Because of this, it's a better idea to lean on the talents of a sanding professional to create a perfectly blended floor, and to ensure that the job is completed safely. This is a not a task for DIY beginners.

Follow this advice, and your limestone floor will soon look as good as new.