Tile Man

I may have mentioned a couple or a hundred times how bad the tile in the kitchen looks.  It was bad when we moved, and I tried different things for cleaning it, different concoctions sure to magically clean that stained grout.  But I couldn't tell any difference after scrubbing.

I was ready to call it quits and either hire a professional tile cleaner or even replace it.  But Mike had a lot of success with the bathroom tiles and wanted to give his way a try.

This is what it looked like last week.

The lighter spots are where the damaged tiles were replaced.

This is a clean floor.  It's just that the tiles were so stained that mopping or scrubbing wouldn't touch them.

This is what I see when I walk into the room today.

And the breakfast room.

Cleaned, scraped, cleaned some more and then painted.  He's actually upset with me that I didn't wait until he's cleaned them better and put on the sealer, but I needed something short to write today.

They almost don't look like tile in the pictures, but in person, you can see the grout a little better, but it's nice grout, evenly colored and clean looking.

Here's a before closeup of the worst tile.

We've tried to imagine what could have been dropped numerous times on this hard tile to do this kind of damage.  Just actual pits and chips in the tile.  The grout is now clean, but the touchup with the grout paint will come tomorrow and kind of fun (the tile man says).

This happened yesterday also.

Goodbye to the old dishwasher.  It just stopped working.  It was awful looking when I moved here, and I hoped for the first year that it would break while we had the 1-year home warranty.  But it didn't, and we've put up with it.

So after a few days of talking about it, we just walked into Lowe's and picked out the cheapest one that had good Consumer Reports ratings.  I think Whirlpool.

The two guys came and made short work of it.

In hindsight, I would have picked black or stainless steel since this one is a different white than the cabinets.  Plain Jane.

But nice and new and clean.  And surprisingly quiet, even though that doesn't matter that much.

Those counter tops are interesting, but they're next.  If they can't be cleaned, they'll have to go.