Kitchen Floors

I'm almost embarrassed to show you these photos.

White grout.  It's the bane of my existence.

I've spent many many hours on my knees scrubbing the grout between the tiles on our kitchen floor with a toothbrush.

Evidently, someone thought it was a great idea to put WHITE grout in a kitchen.  

That may or may not have been me.

And after 6 years of living here, and 6 years of scrubbing it with bleach, grout pens, sealer, you name it, this is how it looks.

Remember, it's supposed to be WHITE.

Pretty, huh?

No matter how much I cleaned our kitchen, it still felt dirty because of this nasty grout and I really thought our only hope was to rip it all up and put down something new.  But, we just don't have the time for that right now with the grand opening of our shop coming up.  So, what's a girl to do?

I've seen several blogs lately mention a product called grout refresher and while I was pretty skeptical, I decided to make a trip to Lowe's to try it out cause I just couldn't stand looking at our dirty stained grout any longer.  With holiday decorating right around the corner, I wanted our kitchen floor to be pretty again.

So, I grabbed a bottle of this stuff in white and settled in for another night of crawling around on my knees on the kitchen floor.

And boy, was it ever worth it.  This stuff is amazing.....take a look at the afters.

How's that for clean WHITE grout!  I was absolutely amazed!  

And I love our kitchen floor again!

 I did the kitchen, laundry and 1/2 bath off the laundry and even the counter tops and I feel like our floors are brand new again.

We still have the two cracked tiles in the doorway to the laundry and in a perfect world, of course I would love to have installed rustic wood floors in here but who am I kidding.  That's not something I want to dig into right now, nor have the time for.  And who cares!  With the floors looking new and CLEAN again, I'm totally happy.

If you decide to try this product out for yourself, here are a few things I learned while using it.

*A little goes a long way.  I applied small drops directly to an old toothbrush and applied that way instead of applying directly to grout.  Somehow less was used that way which is a lot easier when it's time to wipe off the excess. 

* Try to keep as much excess off the tile as possible because it is a bit difficult to remove once the wait period is over.

Other than those two things, I followed the directions on the bottle.

Have a great day!

P.S.  I'm NOT being compensated for this post by the Mapei company and they don't know me.  I just happen to have seen this used in blogland and wanted to try it out for myself and am totally happy with the results and wanted to share in case any one else suffers with grout issues.  :)