Web Wednesday! Grout Cleaning

Any one that has tile knows that grout can be a bugger to keep clean.  Well that is if it is unsealed anyway.  I have not been lucky enough to have sealed grout in my homes here in Florida.  I do however plan on sealing mine after this cleaning;)  There are companies that will come out and clean it for you, but there is a hefty price tag, upwards of $200 bucks is what a friend of mine paid.  I have been a stay at home mom while finishing my degree and I don't have money to spend on something I can easily do myself.  I think of being a stay at home mom as my home and family is my job so if it takes a couple hours to do my grout then so be it.  Not spending $200 dollars on having a professional do it like paying myself $200, well in my mind any way..LOL  I cleaned my tile about 2 years ago and after I found the process that worked for me it went pretty easily.  Well with the wonderful online access to many different blogs and such I had bookmarked some seemingly great ideas that I wanted to try this time.  This is my floor as of Monday morning:

These are pictures in my kitchen.  We use the garage door, which comes into the kitchen, most of the time to come in and out.  It is just easier since I park my car in the garage and the kiddies park their bikes in there so it is just the most used entrance. Now even though I have mats outside the entrances and with 2 dogs I must vacuum quite a bit, the grout just gets nasty.  I have tried mixing baking soda, ammonia and vinegar that I found here and letting it sit then giving it  a scrub and this is the results I got:

The above photo shows that it did get quite a bit cleaned.  I just cannot deal with a lot of scrubbing because of a surgery I had on my wrist, it gets very painful.

This is right in front of the door.  It was still damp sorry about the picture.  I think the mixture would work well in a less high traffic area for me and I am going to give it a go in another room to try it.  I decided to go back to what I have used in the past.  I copped a squat on the floor, turned the radio up and me and my secret ingredient got to work;)  Here is my finished kitchen floor:

What did I use?  Soft Scrub with bleach, a bucket of vinegar and water.  I squirted a little bit of Soft Scrub on the grout, wet my grout brush and gave it a light scrub.  Let it sit for a few minutes and went over with my scrub brush with a long handle, I wanted to scrub all my tile also.  I then mopped up the residue and went over it with my Hoover Floor Mate filled with vinegar and water and this is what my grout looks like.  Here are some before and afters next to each other:

 My floor not only looks clean but over all the kitchen feels cleaner.  I do have to say looking at the before and afters makes me feel yucky!  I want to show some pictures of the last time I did this just to show some more shots of the results I have gained by this.  I have a 3500 square foot 2 story home and I did my complete homes tiles like this in 2 days.  This is the before, it was before I got into blogging and taking pictures of everything.  These were taken with my Blackberry and these were taken in my kitchen nook:

Do you have any recipes for success with grout?  Please share if you do!  I am so wishing I would have sealed my grout back when I did it the first time!  Also I was in Publix yesterday and Soft Scrub was on sale 2/$5.00 and I also saw they have it with baking soda!  I may need to give that a try.  Thank you so much for reading and visiting my blog.  ~Angi