The "master bathroom" in this house is small. By small, I mean 6' x 8' and that includes the bathtub, vanity and toilet footprints. Tile floor, tile up the walls about 3/4 of the way. Fixtures are the originals in robin's egg blue which I kind of like). Tile floor is blue, dove grey and white 1" x 1.5" tiles... original grout was darker dove grey.
Now I understand that tile takes some maintenance and in a house that's 55 years old, things have been done, re-done, etc. Tile, at times, needs to be re-grouted. The right way to do this is to take a grout saw, scritch out at least 1/8" of the existing grout, and re-grout it. Simple. Easy. Cheap. This is one of those household maintenance jobs I learned to do quite awhile ago.
Every time I've been on the bathroom throne, I look at the floor. Something just looked wrong about the grout. Not everywhere, but here and there. My first thought was perhaps the floor was dirty and needed a good scrub. Since the only proper way to give any floor a good cleaning is up close and personal with a scrub brush and a bucket, I learned why the grout didn't look right.
Some MORON decided to use sticky white BATHTUB CAULK instead of grout at some point 10+ years ago, before I bought the house. The caulk had collected gunge which had basically blended in as grey with the proper grout. Whoever did it may has well have used chewing gum for the mess I have on my hands. Not only was the caulk in between the tiles, but it had squee-gee-d up onto the edges of them as well.
I get out my trusty grout saw thinking to make light, quick work of this mess. WRONG. You see, caulk is flexible. And sticky. It just LAUGHED at me and my puny grout saw. Right. I'll use a small screwdriver. WRONG. You see, one of tile grout's main ingredients is >>sand<<. It's basically sandy cement. You guessed it... that screwdriver is ruined. Basically, I just ground down the end.
Okay, so what next? AH! A utility knife with a blade. YES! SUCCESS... sort of. Same grinding down issue but now we're getting somewhere. Slowly. VERY slowly. I might clean area around about 15 - 20 tiles before the point is ground off by the grout and the blade becomes useless. Utility knife blades are not cheap and this is not easy on my hands, either. Well, I've come up with a solution for cheap blades... disposable box cutters that come three to a pack from The Dollar Tree Store. Each box cutter has a single piece of metal that snaps off at the end to give you a new, sharp edge... basically 12-15 blades per cutter. Eureka!! They have about the same life as the more expensive utility knife blades, but ... well, they're cheap.
Back to scritch, scritch, sweep, vacuum. What a mess. I started this literally weeks ago. I'm about 1/3 of the way done. It will take under an hour to re-grout the entire floor, but the prep time is killing me!
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