grody grout

When we first got our house, we had some grody grout and caulk. Around the sink was a ton of mold and broken tiles. It was nasty. When the last owners put in the kitchen, they also used brown grout instead of white. It just made everything look dirty.

So off to Home Depot we went to see what we could do about it… and look what was staring at us on the shelf …

We started the project at midnight and it was super easy. You have this little tool kind of like a knife and you scrape off the top layer of grout. When we did this around the sink and removed the caulk, the broken tiles basically just fell off. What was under them had corroded away.

We used this compound from the kit kind of like you would glue and put them back in place. We could have replaced the broken pieces but that would have involved buying new tile, some how getting it cut to the right size, etc. Doable, however, we don’t plan to keep the tile counter tops. We want to get granite, so this is our cheap temporary solution. We just “glued” the pieces together :)

While Lan was doing this, I was busy removing grout on the counters. We have a shop vack (its like a vacuum hose), so we had that going right next to where I was scraping out grout to control dust. After that we took the white grout and applied it to the grout lines with our fingers. It just seemed less messy than applying it over the whole tile. We used a wet sponge to clean the tiles and we were done for the night.

It took us about a month after that to get back around to re-caulking the sink. But it is now officially done, and man did it make a huge difference. I am now willing to wait a few years to replace the counters and sink, where as before it was an urgent problem… especially since I am allergic to mold… and ugly grout :)

We didn’t do the back splash so you can see the difference. The counters look so much cleaner now. Not too bad for a temporary solution and $20. If I actually liked tile, I wouldn’t mind keeping it for even longer.