Grout is the worst

If we had chosen our floors, I'm not sure white tile would have made the list in our kitchen. Possibly bathrooms, but with the amount of food we have flying around here on a given day, it's hard to keep the floor looking even halfway decent.  It's pretty easy to clean tile - we have some squirt and mop products and of course a real, thorough mopping is excellent for most spills.


The tradeoff for the easy care of tile is of course its grout.  Which is the worst for many of us who are bothered by the feeling of crud, or, who live in our kitchens.  I've tried a few different cleaners of varying degrees of chemical-inclusion, and they don't make me feel warm and fuzzy inside, or in my nose, which makes me very worried for our furry girls whose insides and noses never leave and might eat something from the floor.  

Not too long ago, I found a suggestion to clean the floors with baking soda and vinegar.  No way! I thought, that's like PG-rated cleaning and these floors are not in good shape.  But then I read it again, and the poster didn't seem to be a liar, as in, she had photos to back her claim up.  So, one night, after poor Alex had sacked out, I decided to give it a go.


I sprinkled baking soda around the edges of six tiles.  The first round, I definitely overdid it, just a light covering should do it.  Then, I busted out my trusty spray bottle of white vinegar (not the cleaning kind - I feel like the edible amount of acidity is sufficient, and then can always use from the same gallon if needed), and spritzed the grout lines with vinegar.

After the very therapeutic fizzling sounds, that at least made me feel like I was doing something, I scrubbed at the joints with a grout brush.  We bought one at Target for six or seven dollars when we first moved into our last apartment and realized the water was going to leave orange stains on the white shower grout forever.


It is officially paying off, because I was able to scrub a good bit of the dirt out of our kitchen floor, rinsing the brush out periodically.  After hitting all of the tile edges, I wiped the excess baking soda into a pile in the middle of one of the tiles, and spritzed with another round of vinegar.  It would probably have been more effective to use less baking powder from the get-go, and do a couple of rounds of this.  I scrubbed down the edges one last time, and left the floor to dry to see how it looked in the morning.

I also thought it best to stop loudly scrubbing our kitchen floor, unless I wanted to write a very short follow-up post on how to make your husband ready to throw things at you because he ran around and did errands all Saturday and was exhausted while you HAD to clean something you'd lived with for over nine months.  Even just that night, the difference between the cleaned tiles and unaddressed ones was pretty apparent.

By the light of day, the difference was real, and I got to the rest of the floor over my "break" from classes.  One night, I looked at Alex and said, I need to have fun again.  I am sure he thought I was batty the next day when I'd done this (you know, as a really bizarre version of "fun"), but it felt like we might not have food crud everywhere now.  This was a fantastic opportunity to scrub the difficult spots and around the edges of our kitchen under cabinets and appliances, and also the day my painting pants died of strain.  Sigh.


When I'd finished, there was a baking soda haze all over the floor, and I let that dry and played elsewhere.  After our bedtime cat overlord feeding, I gave the tile a quick clean with hot water and a fresh mophead, and called it good enough for the day.  When we get the kitchen put away, I'll give another good mop to it and be fortified by success, ready to return to the cabinets (you know, sitting around since December....).  Also, now that the caulk is happy in the bathroom, I guess the floor looks pretty awful...

A Nest for our Nest

When we bought this condo, we made a deal that we would not remove anything that was in good working order.  This was determined when our kitchen faucet started leaking, and Jenn wanted a new one, but knew it shouldn't happen if it could be fixed.  Alex kindly pointed out that it could be fixed.

So, our existing thermostat received exposure from the sunniest area in our home, and would occasionally read 80 degrees in, you know, December, which meant we would have no heat in any other rooms of the house.  Below is the best photo I could find of the previous setup.  If I had holed up in our hallway of a kitchen, that was no big deal because it was probably 70+ in there anyways, but if we were anywhere else it was not so great and Nyobi and I just huddled under the blankets.  Come to think of it, why did I push to change this arrangement?

The breaking point for me was mid-January, when the thermostat read 73 but the house had to have been 65. So I cranked it up to 74.  When the sun went down, I turned it back to a normal temperature and went about my life.  We experienced some awesomely hot evenings of - 74 (!!!) for the next week or so, which really means I woke up burning up (never happens) and Alex just suffered in his sleep.  It was programmable, and could have been addressed in that way, but we were not going to be able to do anything about the sun, other than moving it to another wall, which would have been even worse because the opposite side of the wall is the office which is already all kinds of hard to use with the fuse box.  Enough, we said.

We ordered a Nest.

It is so shiny and beautiful and perfect and has an app and we can manage the temp from anywhere with it.  That alone is worthwhile, as evidenced by the week I was recently holed up in bed sick.

 It also "learns" our habits and will figure out that, no, people who sleep with a dog and a cat and a good blanket do not need it to be 74 in the night, so even the cold person wakes up sweating.  And, even if the learning did not happen, it would be helpful because there is an option that we can turn on and it ignores a turn of "Sun Beats Down" (yes, a nerdy board game reference).

I also researched online, and learned that utility companies can offer a rebate on a new thermostat, which helped to soften the blow.  Our electric company provides a substantial rebate of $100, and our gas company does as well, only $20, but we are going to heat no matter what, so they have us.  Given that I found the Nest on Amazon for $247, that's almost half of the cost, for what we really wanted.

For anyone considering a new thermostat, we also looked into the Ecobee smart thermostat, but our wiring was not appropriate.  We needed a different power supply set up than our current HVAC wiring allowed, and it would have required another fix which seems really silly.  No additional fixes for our fix, please.  You can learn about this on both the  Ecobee and Nest websites.

I probably could have learned some cheats to work out the thermostat properly, but it just wasn't worth it to us as we plan to live here long-term, and a huge part of why we DIY is to improve our life and home without breaking the bank when we can, so we can budget out for larger needs that we find appropriate.  There's also no one who would put up with these working conditions, I mean cats and food stuff everywhere at any given time, but, hey, we have to make do with what we can.