Adventures in Renovation

I stayed up till 5: 00 in the morning last night working on the grout in the bathroom. I started at about 9:30 maybe. Read all the instructions carefully. Mixed the grout. Laid it in the tile joints. I cleaned the tile a half hour after I was done grouting just like the instructions said. Then I left around 12:30 AM to go make some coffee and wait for the grout to set up enough. The instructions said to wait 1 1/2 to 2 hours so I came back in an hour to clean up again. That's when everything went horribly wrong.

The grout was way too hard by then and I was having a really hard time trying to scrub off the excess from the joints and the haze on the tile surface. I was using one of those dish sponges with a nylon scouring pad on the back of it. I had to really really go at it to take anything off and I was having to scrub almost every joint in between each tile. It took me an hour to do about a 2 ft square area maybe. And the longer it took me, the harder the grout was getting. I was even scrubbing the scouring pad right off the back of the sponge. Then I tried a really stuff nylon brush I bought for stripping paint and that worked even better. I was able to do a bigger area much more quickly but it was still taking a long time. So the hours ticked away and the sweat poured off my body. All the while the grout got harder.

Finally around 5:00AM I gave up and went home. In all that time I only cleaned up about maybe 12 sq ft, only about a quarter of the whole space. The whole floor looked like a mess. I was ready to cry.