Grout Colourant | Stone Cleaning and Polishing Tips for Ceramic Floors

Cleaning and Preparing the Ceramic Tile and Grout

Before colouring the grout, it made sense to give the Ceramic tile and grout a thorough clean by scrubbing in a weak dilution of Tile Doctor Pro-Clean with a floor buffer fitted with a scrubbing pad running at slow speed. Once done I rinsed the floor with water and extracted the slurry with a wet vacuum.

With any grit and dirt removed from the floor the next step was to prepare the grout for the colourant. Tile Doctor have an acidic pre-treater cleaner for this which cleans and microscopically etches the grout giving the colourant a superior bond with the colourant. The solution is applied to the grout and then scrubbed in with a stiff brush before being rinsed off with water as before.

Applying Grout Colouring

With the tiles clean and the grout prepped I left the floor to dry for an hour before moving onto grout colouring using a colour of their choosing. There are ten colours in the Tile Doctor range and they are easily applied using a small brush wiping off any excess as you go, it was a large area with a lot of grout lines to cover so took the rest of the day to complete

Ceramic Tiled Kitchen Floor After Grout Cleaning in Childs Ecrall

I have to agree with the customer, changing the grout colour was a good move and I think you will agree the floor now looks much improved. The grout colourant has the additional advantage of providing a barrier over the grout which will protect it from further issues and make it as easy to clean as the ceramic tiles.

Source: Ceramic Tile and Grout Cleaning Service in Childs-Ercall, Shropshire

One of the first issues people have with shower rooms is the Silicone needs to be replaced, even a good quality Silicone like Mapei Ultra-seal which is fully waterproof and stain and mould resistant can still succumb to persistent damp issues. In fact it can get so humid in these areas the warm atmosphere is akin to a tropical rain forest.

To avoid the build-up of mould I recommend you rinse the wall tile and silicone down with plain water from the shower head after every shower and then leave the tiles to dry. Open the window and door to let out the warm condensation and after 5 to 10 minutes partly close the window (to the security setting) and then partly close the door, this then normalizes the room temperature thus inhibiting mould spores from blooming, as mould wont start to Spore on a cold room.

The pictures were taken from a shower room at a house a few miles up the road in Kendal where mould had caused a lot of staining to the silicone sealant and to the tile and grout both inside the shower cubicle and in the bathroom itself. There were also a couple of loose tiles around the base of the shower cubicle which needed to be re-fixed.

Shower Cubicle Before Restoration Kendal

Cleaning Ceramic Tile and Grout

We started by spraying the tile and grout down with Tile Doctor Pro-Clean which is a strong alkaline cleaner, spraying it on mixes it air which helps it to stick to Vertical surfaces allowing it to get to work on the dirt. We left it to dwell for ten minutes before scrubbing it in by hand using a stiff grout brush; this process certainly improved the grout but unfortunately it had become too badly stained to be satisfactory so we decided to recolour the grout using a white grout colourant.

Once the shower tile was dry the loose tiles were removed and the damp plaster board behind chopped out and replaced. The tiles were then cleaned up, fixed back into position, then grouted and the silicone sealant around the base of the shower cubicle was stripped out and replaced with new.

Shower Cubicle During Restoration Kendal

Colouring Grout

One to two coats of white colourant were applied to the grout throughout the shower cubicle and shower room in order to get a uniform appearance and this final touch completed the transformation.

The other advantage of these particular colourant products is that they are epoxy based and form a barrier of the grout preventing future staining and making it very easy to clean going forward.