Grout, grout, let it all out

I don’t know why that Tears for Fears song came to my head… =)

In our wee bathroom, we have wee white tiles on the floor. With supposedly white grout. After I first bought this house, I remember trying to clean the grout with straight bleach and a number of cleaners. All I got was a fumey bathroom. After brainstorming a bit, I decided to try to use baking soda and hydrogen peroxide.

That worked better than any of the cleaners I bought. It’s been almost five years since then, and I’m ashamed to say I haven’t scrubbed the grout since then. So I looked on the web for a green way to clean grout, and low and behold, my baking soda and peroxide was what everyone recommended!

I started by spraying hydrogen peroxide on the floor (I just happened to have a spray top that was the same size as the bottle), and then sprinkling baking soda on top (I found the idea of re-using a parmesan cheese container for baking soda on pinterest). I ended up spraying more peroxide on top of that and letting it sit for a few minutes. The result was a paste. Then I scrubbed with a grout brush, which I frequently dipped into more peroxide. Last time I had used a stiff-bristle brush that was about the size of my hand, but it made a huge mess — spraying my cleaner all over the place… so I got a grout brush thinking that it would contain the mess. I was wrong. It just made the process more tedious and it still made a mess. But, my grout is looking a lot better!  Now I’m wincing while I share with you how dirty my grout really was.  Ewwww!

If you want to try this technique on your tile grout, just be forewarned that the clean-up is messy. If you use a stiff brush to clean the grout, the paste will spray and will fly up and stick to the walls, bathtub, toilet, etc. So you have to wipe down the walls a bit, and then wipe up the floor. I suppose if you had time to completely let it dry, it might be pretty easy to just sweep or vacuum up before you wipe it down.  I’ve also heard that you can incorporate either lemon juice or vinegar into cleaning grout.  Does anyone have experience doing that?

Now, I wonder if there are any natural ways to seal the grout to keep it looking clean…?