So I’m sitting here at home sick as a dog, so what better way to spend my day than updating this new blog! Now, on my other blog I posted an entry about painting the grout in our house. I kept saying I was going to update on how that went, but I never got around to it. I painted the grout in July of 2013 and it’s now August 2014.. it’s about time I actually do that update lol!
You can click on that link above to read the original grout painting entry, but I’ll give y’all a quick rundown. We’ve been in this house for over a year now. The original owners were the ones who laid the grout, and the wife had the bright idea to use several different grout colors.. yeah.. it was ugly as it sounded. The only room they didn’t use three different grout colors in was our master bath. Because that made perfect sense. So being the new homeowner that was trying to save money and be all handy and all that.. I decided to do a little Pinterest research on painting our ugly grout. It was backbreaking, time consuming, and not at all as easy as people made it out to be (but maybe that’s just me being a huge fail!!), but overall it looked great and was worth all the trouble. Joel and I were both really happy with how it turned out. And here’s the result:
After painting the grout. The first two are the girls’ bathroom and the second two are the entryway.
But you see.. there’s one major flaw to painting your grout.. it has to be in good shape before you paint it. And ours was not. The paint itself is holding up great in the girls’ bathroom for the most part. But we have a major problem. Our tile is old, and the grout is in really bad shape. This house is over ten years old now, so that means the tile is over ten years old, which means the grout is over ten years old. And now it’s cracking and the tiles are breaking. So I did all that work for absolutely nothing! It took two day to paint one bathroom and the entryway, and almost a week to fully paint the kitchen/dining/laundry space. We ended up not painting the master bathroom, because the tiles began cracking in the kitchen only days after we finished painting the grout in there. So here’s what our grout and tile look like one year later:
The grout and tile in our kitchen one year later. This is the worst of the damage to the floors.
Yeah.. it’s not a pretty site. We’re going to need to replace the floors in three of the rooms in our house starting with the kitchen. Homes in Arizona tend to have a lot of tile in them. The majority of the homes here are nothing but tile floors, so it’s a lot of square feet to replace. To top it all off, the tile was laid incorrectly. It caused damage to the concrete, so there a spots in the concrete that will need to be repaired too. It’s a huge mess!!!! Our eventual goal is to rip up all of the flooring in the house and stain the concrete. But if I had realized something like this would happen, I wouldn’t have spent the money buying the five kits.. at $24 a kit.. to paint the grout in our house.
Ultimately a very expensive lesson learned! Painting your grout.. while cheaper and effective in most cases.. will not work if you’re tile and grout just flat out need replacing. So before any of you hop on Pinterest and see how easy everyone else makes painting their grout seem, take a step back and think about whether or not you just need to replace your tile!
happiness grows.. 