About 5 months ago, I moved into a recently-renovated house, which I'm
renting. The flooring in most of the house (kitchen, den, bathrooms,
etc.) is floor tiling, with the exception of the bedrooms and stairs,
which are carpet. The tiles themselves are sort of a creamy marbled
color, and the grout is dark brown.
I'd never cleaned the tiles before, but they were getting a bit on the
dirty side (especially in the kitchen), so I asked around for advice
on how to clean them. No one seemed to know how, so after a while, I
decided to try out Barkeeper's Friend
(http://www.jensco.com/thekitchendrawer/cleaning_utility/metal_cleaners/metalcleaners11510.html),
the cleaner I use for the kitchen counters. I tried it out on a few
tiles with a mop, was able to get a lot of the gunk on the floor to
come up, and ended up doing the entire kitchen area.
Unfortunately, after the floor dried the grout looked like it had
chalk dust in it. Figuring I may have used a bit too much Barkeeper's
Friend, I started saturating the floor with water, then mopping it up
with towels. I think this has lessened the chalkiness a bit, but it's
still there and very prevalent. Additionally, afterwards I realized
I'd made a stupid mistake by not reading the entire label on the back
of the Barkeeper's friend, which actually states that it may discolor
colored grout (d'oh, though oddly enough the link I provided says it
works great on grout).
Anyway, I'm looking for a way to get rid of this discoloration. I've
thought about using something like lemon juice (thinking that maybe
BK's Friend is basic and could be neutralized), as well as just
continuing to do my saturate-mop regimen with the floor, once a day
for a week or so. I have also thought about trying to get some sort
of brown coloring to go over the grout with, but I'm not aware if such
a product exists.
I've taken pictures of the normal grout and the discolored grout and
posted them at "http://www.brownjava.org/ga/".
Any advice as to how I can get this grout looking normal again? |
