Day 229: It's a-grout time

Hello there, house progress. It's been a while.

As my groan-worthy post title suggests, we have started up again on the bathroom after several weeks of hiatus. Not to say that Garrett lazed around while I was gone - please see Day 213 for all the details on a very productive weekend of "cleaning" and refer to the tasty veggies we've been eating as a result of his hard work! But since the tiles were laid in June, the bathroom hasn't seen much love. Until this past Saturday.

Grouting is a fairly straightforward task and we don't have a huge area of tile to do so this was a nice project to get us back into the swing of things. We've started with the floor - our "wood" look tiles - and have yet to tackle the actual shower. There is a different grout for each of the floor, shower floor, and shower walls since the three tile designs call for three different grout colours. Also, the floor grout is sanded to reduce slippery-ness.

We took a tag team approach: Garrett mixed the powder and water to make the paste, I smeared it into the cracks and wiped up the excess, and Garrett followed with the sponge to try to get the grout left on the tiles. It was really quite quick once I got the hang of it and we were done the grouting stage before dinner (we had only started late afternoon after my impromptu nap :).

Inconspicuous areas like behind the toilet = a good place for a beginner to get the hang of a new skill

After dinner, we went back over the tiles with wrung out sponges to clean the tiles. We did another sponge session last night and will go over it all with a rag tonight get more of the haze off.

Garrett giving some hazy tiles the once-over with a damp sponge.

I'm hoping the sponging and rag-buffing will be sufficient to clean the tiles but, if not, there's always haze remover we can resort to. I'll wait until we're done with the shower grouting before making any decisions on what constitutes sufficiently clean. In the meantime, we'll dwell on how much better the tiles look with some grout in the mix as motivation to finish up with the shower.