As Seen on TV

I have a little confession to make:  I really love infomercials.  I don't mean that I love buying from infomercials, in fact I haven't bought a thing, but for some reason I've always enjoyed watching infomercials.  Something about the over-the-top "acting" and miraculous, change your life inventions have always kept me infatuated.  That being said, I rarely believe the hype and mark most of it down as just good marketing, at least effective marketing.

Becca and I dedicated this weekend to cleaning and staging the house for her friend Megan to come by and take some pictures for the future home website (Coming Soon).  One of the many things on my list was to clean the bathroom floors and see if I could get them looking any better with minimal work.  So when I started scanning the internet for a solution for cleaning grout in tile floors I was a little hesitant to believe that oxygen bleach, the main ingredient in one of infomercials' favorite sons: Oxi Clean, was the hands-down favorite of many bloggers out there.  However, I'm no professional cleaner and when the internet tells me to use Oxi Clean who am I to doubt, so I gave it a try.  All I can say is WOW!  Oxi Clean really did clean the grout and did it rather easily.  With just a little of time and even less elbow grease our dingy dark grey grout was a bright white; a color I had quite literally never seen out of our floors.  I was thoroughly impressed.

There is a lot of information out there on how to do this, but this is the route I took.  Sweep or vacuum your floors to get rid of any excess dust.  Mix one ounce of Oxi Clean for every two cups of warm water in a bucket.  Take some type of stir stick and mix it real well because it won't just dissolve on its own.  Use a measuring cup with a spout (my choice) or a turkey baster to liberally poor the mixture along the grout lines making sure the entire surface is covered.   Depending on the size of the room your cleaning you may break it up into a few sections and only poor in one section at a time.  I found it easiest if I didn't poor any further than I could reach from in one spot.  Once the mixture is down walk away and let it sit for 5-15 minutes depending on how dirty it is.

When you come back make sure you have a bucket of warm, clean water, some type of wash rag, a scrub brush, and a big dry towel.  You could use an old tooth brush but I sprung for the grout brush at Lowe's and I think it was worth the money.  Take the brush and dip it in the Oxi Clean mixture and then start scrubbing the grout.  It really shouldn't take much work, just scrub it a few times and move on.  I usually stuck to about 4sq feet at a time of scrubbing and then take your rag soaked with the clean water and wipe up the mixture where you just finished scrubbing.  As you do you should see that the grout you just scrubbed is perfectly clean.  Rinse the rag out and continue until most of the mixture has been mopped up.  Then take your towel and dry where you just finished cleaning.

That's it.  Just continue this process a section at a time and in no time you should have wonderfully clean tile floors.  I've got some pictures below that gives you a better idea of the before and after.  It truly amazed me.  Stay tuned to this site where we'll soon be posting more pictures of the house along with website for the house once we put it up for sale.  It's coming quickly.