Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Making Your Tiled Floor Look New Again

A while back, I guess it's probably been a month ago now. We had our friend, and handyman, over to look at a few projects that we were thinking about doing to get a feasability review and a cost estimate. We find this an important step, as there are things that we don't think about - like load bearing walls and projects that just would be way more than we want to invest.

After we looked at, and determined what we could / couldn't do of the projects that we called about, we started to talk about flooring. When we moved in, we chose carpeting for the dining room. It really was a financial decision that I question every day, as it will cost us more to change it out than it would have to do it in the first place. We know that one of our next projects is to replace the carpeting in the dining room with hardwood. I also mentioned that ideally, had I to do it over again, I would have put hardwood in the dining room and the foyer, reserving the tile for only the kitchen.

This comment got us onto the topic of tile floor and how dirty the grout was looking and how it never seemed to become fully clean and back to its original color. Our handyman said that he had recently cleaned his grout using Clorox Cleanup with Bleach. He said that he worked in small sections, spraying it on and allowing it to sit for a few minutes and then scrubbing and rinsing before moving onto the next section.

In cleaning out the cabinet in our bathroom, the first of many clean-out/organize sessions I have had lately, I found a partial bottle of Clorox Cleaner with Bleach and decided to do a test patch that was in a fairly dirty area. We loved the results.
So, the next time my husband was out, he picked up another bottle and a scrub brush and set out to clean the grout. It is amazing the difference that it made. Somehow the original, lighter color of the grout makes the room visually seem bigger. It is so nice to have a 'like new' looking floor.

(not sure why the color looks so different here!)

This is one cleanup tip that we will bank and use again and again.

This post shared at Works for Me Wednesday.