Around our House: the tile floor

I am so thankful to have wood floors throughout most of our house!  I love the way the look and the way they feel under my feet (they stay pretty warm in the winter).  In the family room (the room with the fireplace that's open to the kitchen) however, we have tile.  When we first moved in, we had the cleaners come and mop it because before it was the family room it was the partying room (for the college guys living here).  Let's just say that mopping helped the floor a ton!  When we moved in, it looked like this: white tiles and dark grout (see the photo on the right).

The lady who mopped apparently didn't feel a need to pay much attention to the edges though, something that my mama taught me was important when mopping, especially with a floor this dirty.  As you can see in the photo to the left, even after she mopped there was built up gunk in the corners, and the base boards were all in need of a good toothbrush-scrubbing.  (The college boys who lived here had a big hunting dog who I'm sure contributed to some of this room's filth, not to mention that at least one of them dipped a lot and didn't have a good aim...)

Personally, I couldn't handle the dirt all around the edges of the room, especially knowing that Enoch would be playing in here and his balls and toys would inevitably end up all over...  It bothered me immensely.  So I decided to put a little elbow grease into those edges in order to get rid of the grime.

before scrubbing (top) and after scrubbing (bottom)

As soon as I started scrubbing on the base boards though, I discovered a little secret...  in reality, our grout isn't black... it's whitish-gray!!  That's right..  So my small project of cleaning up around the edges ended up becoming scrubbing every square inch of tile and grout by hand with a scrub brush.  yikes!   {especially yikes because our family room is roughly 15' x 18'!}

Unfortunately, having an ever-expanding belly did not help matters since I needed to be squatting down to scrub.  haha!  Let's just say that it took me a few months to tackle this whole thing.  ;)

For those wondering what method I found to be best, I used a medium sized, hard bristled scrub brush and a tooth brush for scrubbing.  {you can also buy grout scrub brushes though, which I might do next time}  For my cleaner, I followed the directions on the back of my OxiClean box and mixed an almost full scoop with a bucket of warm water.  The OxiClean and scrub brush combo worked so easily!  I literally did a few scrubs over the grout with a wet scrub brush, mopped up the dirty water with a rag, scrubbed any stubborn dirt one more time, and then mopped up the remaining water with a rag again.  Last I rinsed with clean, cool water and tried to avoid slipping.  :)

Here's my finished product:  

I'm so glad to have a thoroughly clean floor in Enoch's play space - now the hard part will be keeping the white tile with white grout looking, well, white.   ;)