Grout, You Make Me Shout!

....and not in a good way!

Our master bathroom has white and green tile (that we absolutely hate and plan on replacing sometime down the line).  Since we can't afford to replace the tile right now, we've gotta live with it, which means that we need to clean the grout. The grout in between each and every tile looks absolutely disgusting.  Here is a picture of the filthiness:

Looks awful, right?  Every time I walk into our bathroom I cringe because I just can't believe how dirty the floor is.  It looked this way the day we moved in (so I'm going to go ahead and assume that the previous owners didn't really properly care for the floor--hence the reason it looks the way it does).  I've been waiting for awhile to address the dirt and decided today was the day I was going to fix it...or so I thought.  I did some research and saw that some people had used a mixture of vinegar and baking soda to get their grout to go back to being white in color.  I had both ingredients on hand, so I decided to try it out.  Here's everything I used:

(Note: I show a fairly stiff bristled brush in the above picture.  I used this to scrub two tiles and decided that a toothbrush would work better).

I mixed the vinegar and baking soda into the bowl and dipped a toothbrush into the mixture.  I tried to spread around the mixture to make it last longer.  After letting the mixture sit on the grout for a minute, I scrubbed the grout with the toothbrush to bring up any loose dirt that was in between the tiles.  

After scrubbing the grout and white tiles, I made sure to wipe away the dirty mixture with a paper towel.

 Some dirt was coming up, but not all of it.  Whomp, whomp, whomp. I scrubbed three rows of tiles and here is the result:

If you count the first three rows, top to bottom, you can sort of tell the difference between the clean grout and the dirty grout.  To me, there's not a big enough difference to make me want to jump up and down and shout, "Hallelujah!" Just these three rows took me about an hour and a half to scrub.  Ridiculous and totally not worth the time and effort spent on it.  I'm not saying that I'm giving up on trying to make our grout white again, but I sure am giving up on this method (Note: if you are just looking to clean your bathroom tile, this vinegar/baking soda mixture will do the trick, but if you are trying to clean and whiten your grout, this is not the mixture for you!  My grout still has a yellowish tint to it...Boo).  Yes, this post is about a DIY project that didn't go as planned, but I feel like it is important to blog about those instances as well.  It's not a true DIY blog unless you have failures and triumphs that you share with others.  I'm all about being realistic and honest.

If you have any ideas on how to clean grout that looks like this, I'd love to hear them.

I have a couple of other products in our closet that I'm going to try in the meantime.  We'll see if they clean the tile AND leave the grout looking whiter than I've ever seen it.  Fingers crossed! :)