Everything hurts. Mostly my backside. I am not good at sitting on the floor as a rule, but a hard tile floor is torture. I spent most of the day sitting kind of canted on one hip (always the right), scrubbing a slurry of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide into the filthy stained grout in two foot by three foot sections. You wouldn't think this would be particularly difficult, but as my body betrays me more and more over the years, this is working out to be a three or four day slog.
I have tried a half dozen methods to clean this grout, and the only thing up until now that sort of worked was that clingy gel toilet cleaner with bleach. It was unsustainable leaning over that with a detail scrub brush, so after one experiment with it, I gave up and bought grout paint, with every intention of using it. But the other night, I stayed up watching one of my favorite YouTube cleaning channels (yeah, I have weird hobbies), and I learned the correct formula: baking soda and peroxide. Scrub it in just a bit, and walk away. Come back and rinse it off. Although I threw in my own twist, and used a homemade cleaning spray of dish soap, vinegar, and water, to fizz up the baking soda. It took all day to finish half of the floor, mostly because of the onerous nature of getting down and back up again.
I can almost stand the ugly pink Saltillo tiles, now that the grout is no longer dark brown with dirt and kitchen grease. It will take ages to finish this project all the way through the other rooms with the brown tiles. I tell you, if money fell in my lap, I would rip this horrible tile up in a heartbeat, putting down wood that matches the bedrooms, and maybe authentic linoleum (NOT vinyl) in the kitchen, to match the vintage of the house.
I took no pictures of the floor. I've hated anytime the dirty grout was visible in five years' worth of photos to date. Maybe once it is completely finished, I'll feel okay about it. Instead, I stole a picture that was sent to me tonight. It's much cuter.
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