Half Bath Renovation: Grout

Grouting ceramic tile is in and of itself a pain in the ass. Grouting slate tile ups that by a factor of a gazillion.

Okay, so, I’ve grouted before, so I know that it can be cumbersome with all the wiping and wiping of the excess grout that forms a haze over the tile that indelibly occurs while grouting the traditional way. To try to bring that particular issue to a minimum, my partner reads on the internets that you can simply fill a heavy duty Ziploc bag with grout, cut a small hole in a corner and squeeze out the grout into the lines, thus, bypassing the messiness. I must have done something wrong in the mixing process (or got distracted by the neighbors stopping by) because when I put the grout into the bag I thought to myself this is just like frosting consistency and should be a piece of cake to pipe! How misleading this was.

I snipped a hole a little larger than the grout line and started to squeeze and noticed I couldn’t even get the stuff to come out at all. So, I figured I needed a bigger hole. That didn’t work, it just looked like it was building up pressure and waiting to pop like a balloon, a grout balloon, full of sticky grey Crystalline-Entity-filled poop consistency goo. At this point, I’m pretty certain a whole slew of cusswords flew out of my mouth and the realization that I’d have to go about it the old fashioned way was quickly setting in and reinforced when my partner said it aloud. Good thing we sealed the tile first! Of course, I could have always made another batch of grout and added a little more water, but that would have been easy and seriously, when do I ever make anything easy on myself?

Using the Ziploc bag to keep the grout as gooey as it could be, I cut the hole a little larger and squeezed out a little at a time and used a grout float to fill in the lines. This process certainly sounds easier than it is, because you see, slate isn’t all smooth and perfectly level like, say, ceramic tile, and so grouting takes a lot more time. And when you’re done, it looks like you just seriously screwed up all the hard work you’ve put into the project up to this point because the slate tiles now look like crap.

After I was done grouting, I began the process of wiping off the excess from the tile and in the process smooth out the grout lines. This takes forever because of the aforementioned nooks and crannies slate tiles have that invariably are happy little hiding places for grout to reside. I ended up rinsing out the sponge about fifty times before allowing it to set for a couple hours to do the next step, wiping off the haze. Naturally, the haze began to form more noticeably on the darker tiles, but it all wiped off pretty easily, albeit slowly, during the initial pass-through so I figured the haze wipe would go nice and smooth. Who am I kidding?

When the two hour waiting period was over, I grabbed the now almost dry sponge and began wiping the haze off and the tiles looked absolutely fantastic… for about ten minutes before another layer of haze formed. This time I decided to dry the dry buff method, which seemed to get about half the tiles clean, but the other half still had quite a bit of grout in all those fine lines, so I went back over it with a now wrung out sponge and focused on those areas. This still doesn’t get everything, but almost everything, and isn’t that close enough? Well, this morning I’m running a mental debate over whether I should try at it one more time or simply allow the small amount of excess grout to stay in the nooks and crannies because it is a natural grey color that blends in nicely with the tiles and it will act as a stabilizer for those parts and prevent them from chipping, right? Oh well, I’m sure it’ll all work out in the end.