After installing vinyl tiles, they asked for a day’s sticky-sticking time before we walked on or grout them. Yea – or not.
“My house – my rules. You’ll stick – and you’ll stick now.”
The vinyl tile box had specified the size of grout spacers required, and we’d simply picked up the ready-mixed pot of grout on the shelf below the tiles.
Shouldn’t grout match? A vague and buried memory suggested that grout comes in different colours… but our options with the ready-mix stuff (without leaving that aisle, moving muscles and looking elsewhere) were either grey – or creamy white. Well I’m not actually stupid – so we picked the grey, grabbed a “grout float”, sponge, and the spacers… and evacuated the premises. Shop with us – we do Home Depot on speed.
As this task involved filling cracks – my absolute favourite activity – I was happy to claim grouting for myself. Plus Paolo had done all the tile measuring & installation, and I wanted to be proud of it too.
“Yep, go out and play some curling, Canada Boy. I’ll have this finished in a jiffy.”
Honest ambition. So… grout. How do we do this crazy thang? I read About.com. This Old House. Maybe HGTV & Damon Bennett were involved too. Grout. I hit up YouTube and befriended yet another ace contractor teaching how-to so fast his hands blurred.
By this time, I was camped in the bathroom like a little creature, knee pads in place, with my laptop on the floor. Grout! I liked the concept – smush the business into the cracks and seal it shut. Gingerly dropping a daub on to the first tile gap: smash smash smash. Now to remove the excess… scrape, scrape, scrape?
“Nooooo! It’s making a mess!!! The perfect tiles are ruined!”
And the grout colour? So dark. So dreadfully dark. My dad had the misfortune to sign on to Skype at that moment.
“Help! Crisis!”
Words any firstborn knows will get a response. So the poor man was roped into a Skyped-grouting-lesson with no chance of escape. Paternal reassurance:
- My grout was the perfect colour – it would lighten as it dried.
- I didn’t need to clean up every crack after every application – better to do a larger area quickly & then clean in one go. (All instructions had said to use a sponge and a bucket of constantly-changed water … soon realized that I was sitting next to a bath tub. The process sped up tenfold).
- Remove the excess on a diagonal? Not quite what I’d been doing. Having misunderstood the YouTube contractor’s suggestion to “use the grout float to remove excess at 45 degrees”…. I’d tried holding it at 45 degrees – awkward, unergonomic and unsuccessful.
The vinyl tiles took all they could get as the grout happily snuggled in. It took forever – the knee pads and laptop got their fair share of alabaster grey. Paolo came home hours later to find a wrecked and broken bathroom-dweller drinking wine on the floor and admiring her first grout work.
This sick love of grouting marks an Ugly Baby first — I want to do it again. Badly. Updated – favourite renovating tasks:
- Grouting vinyl tile
- Caulking
- Crack-filling
Final act for a finished floor? It might upset you, but it’s for the greater good. We threw out the piggy slippers. Finally – a tiled & grouted bathroom floor for BARE FEET! Just two steps left & we’ve got a brand new bathroom. Isn’t it terribly exciting?
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Photo credit Tina Lawson, Daniel Lobo, Belvoir Army Engineers and US Army Corps of Engineers via Flickr Creative Commons
Hey, you want a s'more? Some more of what?
So THAT is what they meant by “remove the grout at 45 degrees!” Ummm. I totally did what you did. I held the float at an angle. Thanks for clearing that up for me. It IS fun, isn’t it? You probably figured this out once you got the tub flowing with constantly clean water, but that definitely helps down the line when it comes to the dreaded grout haze removal. I realized that if I did a good enough job with the clean water I didn’t have to do anything but buff off the haze.
Can’t wait to see your grouted and vinyl tiled floor!
Hahaha so glad I’m not the one & only! And I may have enjoyed it so much because I didn’t encounter any haze at all — looks like that was an accidental piece of luck.
No haze = shoulders that aren’t sore for days from the buffing and scrubbing AND no nasty grout haze remover chemical! Woot!
Wow – so we completely lucked out. But skim coating makes my arms strong like ox – maybe there’s a pro to haze’s chemical con?
Noooo.. the piggy slippers! Those little oinkers have seen so much..and have been forced to step on so much. They deserve a retirement package and a tropical vacation. And no, tropical vacation is not code for “City Dump” Poor little piggies.
Yay for non-nasty floors though!!
Pooooor little piggies – now I feel cruel. I think you’re right — but they didn’t really like their first experience at sea. And by sea I mean heavy-duty washer cycle.