Bought a radio then ran away for ever

[venta]

Sunday turned into a day of Doing Things this weekend. Sadly, as is always the way, not quite as many Things got Done as I'd hoped.

ChrisC had also noticed the date and insisted we celebrate St Patrick's day. So we soundtracked our day with Irish bands. We stumbled dazedly round the flat to Whipping Boy, got ourselves in order to the Frankenwalters, accompanied the trip to the tip with the Sultans of Ping F.C., recovered with cake and Divine Comedy, indulged in extravagant bouts of cleaning to the Stiff Little Fingers and ultimately sat down to roast beef with Catchers and The Cranberries.

I'm sure that an interior decorator could tell you what style statement those teeny-tiny little bathroom tiles less than an inch square make. Personally, I think the statement they make is "I like cleaning grout". Or, very possibly "I do not expect to be the person who cleans the grout".

Anyway, the previous owner of the flat had an affinity with teeny-tiny tiles. We do not like cleaning grout, and despite using one of those daily shower cleaners, our grout has slowly gone orange. Why orange? I don't know. The grout in the house I used to live in in Oxford went grey if left unattended. The grout in the flat ChrisC used to live in used to go pink.

Anyway, our grout goes orange. The mother, who is a responsible citizen who does not think people should have orange grout has lent us a steam cleaner (I am unsure what colour her grout goes. I suspect it stays white. Either because it is scared, or because she is much better about cleaning the stuff than I have ever been).

In fairness, I don't think I should have orange grout either, so was quite pleased about the steam cleaner. It turns out to be a thing that looks a bit like a hair-dryer, but with a trigger, and has a natty little brush at the business end. It made the grout go white again - sadly with rather more effort than I'd hoped, but it did it.

I don't think I will ever enjoy cleaning grout. However, if one has to clean it, use a steam cleaner. It still isn't exactly fun, but you get to wield something a bit like a gun and hang out in vaguely post-apocalyptic clouds of steam. If Rutger Hauer cleans his grout, I bet he looks like this while doing it.

(The cleaning did actually take considerably longer than the duration of a Stiff Little Fingers album. Sadly, in the shower cubicle with the steam cleaner running I couldn't hear a damn thing and have no idea what bands may have got an airing.)

So now we have lovely clean grout. Which shows up the patches of grey so much better :( Time to actually deploy that grout whitener. I bought some from Lakeland last year. Apparently it's not talismanic, though, you actually have to put it on the grout...

Comments

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I use a toothbrush and home-made scouring paste made from baking soda, grated soap and borax. Kills all known grout moulds.

[venta.livejournal.com]

That's the kind of thing I should do, but floor to ceiling tiles? With somewhere between 16 and 25 times as much grout as normal sized tiles? You can probably see why I don't :(

The orange doesn't really look like mould, but I don't see what else it can be. The thing that really suffers from black mould is the mastik round the shower door, and I know from experience that if you attack that stuff with anything sufficiently abrasize, you just chew big holes in it :(

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

It is indeed mould, although why it's orange I don't know. Maybe related to those big orange bracket fungi :-)

Steamers are good for all sorts of other things, too -- we got one initially for taking off some old wallpaper, but it's turned out dead handy for misc cleaning tasks.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

I have never (afaik) met you mother, but I approve of the idea of grout staying clean because it's scared. I wish our bathroom would do that.

[venta.livejournal.com]

You've never heard the phrase "white with fright" before?

The mother is, in general, lovely but can be quite scary when you have done those things which you ought not to have done (or left undone those things which you ought to have done).

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

The orange one is a bacteria that grows on soap. Cillit bang kills it too. Black mould however is an absolute bastard. The only thing I've found to work is drying the sealant after having a shower and wiping bleach over it before I go to work. My bathroom keeps ending up with bits of disintegrating cleaning cloths all over it.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I think my current solution to the black mould is a Stanley knife and a new tube of mastik. How I stop it going the same way is a problem, though - I was hoping for a magic answer requiring a bit less effort than yours :( Still, useful to know that there is something that works!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

It's only one half-second swipe per day, over the course of ages. And it is very satisfying when you look and one of the blobs has magically shrunk to half the size.

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

My grout is cream. My sister in law doesn't think I keep my grout clean enough (which has b*******d her chance of a bed here ever again) but hence the steam cleaner. But I'm not scary, honest.