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This is a ceramic tiled hallway floor at a property in the Redland area of Bristol, where the grout had suffered discolouration and darkened. The owner was unhappy about the way it looked as it made each tile more obvious and made the rooms look narrower.
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We often get called out to cover grout cleaning on a ceramic or porcelain floor tile as these tiles are glazed and are easy to clean but the grout will often discolour. Even if cleaned well, the grout can still be patchy due to staining and potentially due to chemical misuse.
By chemical misuse I’m talking about coloured grouts which have a colour dye added to them and this dye is stripped away with the use of strong bleach-based cleaning products or degreasers such as a washing up liquid.
To resolve discolouration issues there are only two options, either you rake out the old grout and start again or clean the grout and re-colour it back the way it was.
Cleaning a Ceramic Tiled Hallway Floor
As the client had no spare tiles and had electric under floor heating installed removing the grout was not a feasible option. The reason being that during the grout removal it’s quite possible the edge of a tile will get chipped and need replacing which in turn would damage the heating element. Also, there’s always the danger that the matt could be cut through when removing the grout.
It was decided grout colouring was the best option as it won’t cause any damage to the tiles, or the underfloor heating and it is long lasting. It can be upset by degreasers and bleaches which is what has upset the main grout in the first place, so we like to leave the client a complimentary bottle of Tile Doctor Neutral Cleaner after every job. This is designed to clean the tiles and has a nice, pleasant lemon scent.
First, we applied Tile Doctor Grout Pre-Treater which cleans the grout and provides an improved bond for the new colourant to adhere to. There are eleven popular grout colours to choose from an on this occasion Limestone was chosen which was a good match for the tiles. Naturally this is down to the customers preference but our advice is that the grout shouldn’t be obvious, it should be the tiles that you see as grout is just secondary and not meant to be all that visible.
The colourant is simply painted onto the grout lines using an applicator tool that screws directly onto the grout bottle which makes the job much faster. Once applied the excess is wiped off the adjacent tile shortly after. Two coasts are usually all that’s needed depending on how badly stained the grout is.
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Once the grout colour had dried completely the job was complete, there’s no need to seal the ceramic tiles as they are sealed with a glaze at the factory during production.
My client was very happy with transformation and before leaving I arranged for a complimentary bottle of Tile Doctor Neutral Tile Cleaner to be sent to the client.
Source: Grout Cleaning and Restoration Service in Redland Bristol
