The Accidental Before & After: Bathroom Disaster Edition

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a problem here at the borrowed abode.

Without our permission, a Before & After has taken place, and not for the better.

Remember our bathroom?

It’s pretty nice, right?   I’m starting to feel that maybe it’s a little too nice for a rental home.

The lovely counter you see before you is most likely marble.  It’s gorgeous, but it’s a pain in the a** to take care of and protect.

The reason I put the bottles of soap and lotion on a little tray is because within a day of buying them and putting them on the counter, they had left marks where they sat.  Marks that were almost impossible to get rid of. It seems that if even the smallest drop of water dripped down the bottle to rest at it’s base on the counter, it “scarred” the surface.

After that, we put the bottles on a tray, were careful to quickly wipe up any substances that got on the counter, and we even bought special marble counter cleaner.

But then, one day last week, I left a bottle of eco-friendly shower cleaner on the counter and went to work.

After work, I walked into the bathroom and noticed liquid sitting all over the counter, around the bottle of cleaner.  Immediately I thought “uh-oh, this is bad.”  Sure enough, I removed the bottle and cleaned off the counter frantically, only to find that I was left with a horrible marred surface:

See all those white markings?  The rectangle is where the base of the bottle sat.  The big splotches are where the bulk of the liquid rested.  The marred areas appear to be raised above the polished surface of the rest of the counter.  But the damage is permanent – meaning no, we can’t just clean it off.

(I inspected the bottle of shower cleaner, and found a very tiny crack in the base of it.  I have no clue how that got there.  Gah.)

A bit of Googling revealed that it is most likely a marble countertop, because marble is very prone to “etching” from acidic liquids and such – unlike granite.   (Also, I noticed many photos showing cup rings etched into marble counters simply from water.)

Back to the problem.  We’re letting our landlord know – this is not something that we want to try and fix on the down low, because we’re out of our league with counter top repairs.   And our landlord or his contractor probably will know a good company to use to fix it.  Of course we’ll need to foot the bill for the repairs.  If it can’t be fixed, we’ll have to have it replaced upon move-out, and take that cost (ouch!) out of our security deposit.

But then, that’s what security deposits are for, right?

Either way, I’ll let you all know what we find out, in case you need to fix a rental property countertop without letting your landlord know!

Do you have any experience fixing marble counter damage like this?  If so I’d love to know!