I wish I were Merriweather at this point. She’s got the right colored dress (BLUE!), and she’s got a magic wand to help her with the cleaning. Unfortunately, this is reality and the only magic I really have to take on the scrubbing I have to do is a good attitude. You’d be surprised how much magic a good attitude has in it. If you have the right mindset, even the most daunting of tasks never seems that bad.

Last time, if you recall, I was really in a lather about being handed a dirty place to live. Well, like most of you have pointed out already, it’s more productive to let the cleaning supplies do the lathering and remember the simple fact that Momma Kitte pointed out:

If you do the cleaning yourself, you know it’s clean and done properly.

(Kitte’s so awesome. Major thanks to her for the reminder and attitude adjustment!)

So, after a frustrating weekend of waiting on the internet company to send out a crew to install my service (they never showed up, btw) I headed out to the store because I had one heck of a list of cleaning supplies to fill. $161 later, I had a cart full of cleaning supplies: mops, brooms, a bucket, a BIG thing of liquid Lysol, a jug of bleach, oven cleaner, toilet cleaner, toilet brush, scouring pads…you get the picture. If it was a cleaning supply that filled a purpose, it went into the cart.

The one thing I got clued in on…this time props go to Rezree…BLEACH PENS! I didn’t even know they existed until she told me about them! As I was shopping, three of them found their way into the cart because the kitchen counters along with kitchen floor and bathroom grout is stained, dirty and in more dire need of bleach than anything I’ve ever seen. (You know it’s bad when I can’t come up with a metaphor to describe something. One look and ‘eww’ and ‘STAPH’ and the phrase ‘CREEPING CRUD’ come to mind. ‘THE FUNK’ is also a good descriptor as whomever lived there before me were definitely dirty people to let the place fall into such disrepair. *Shudder* ‘The Funk’ is a death knell. If I am down to saying something’s got ‘the funk’ you know it’s near on to horrific.)

So with the thought of ‘the funk’ running around my house unchecked, I got everything home and began to put it all away, making time to add the cleaning supplies I already had to the storage area that now houses some major cleaning muscle.

I truly wish I had the words to describe the daunting task in front of me. I am faced with disinfecting the two rooms in any home that should be the cleanest: the kitchen and the bathroom. Now, I want you to take my luck into account, which means that (you guessed it) they are the two filthiest areas of the house.

So after organizing the cleaning supplies, I got the bleach pens out, grabbed an old toothbrush, cleaned off the kitchen counter next to the sink, put on my big rubber gloves and began to work. Never having used a bleach pen before, I found it wonderfully easy to outline each tile with the bleach pen, wait a few minutes, then begin scrubbing the mildew and dirt that had embedded itself in the grout (which seemed to have never been properly cleaned since it was installed years ago).

Just to do a single counter top felt like a major endeavor, but at seeing the grout go from black and grey to white was quite rewarding, making it a gauntlet-thrown challenge to see whether or not I could finish the area before the tendinitis in my elbows forced me to stop.

But happily, I got the one patch done and upon getting up this morning, it was a joy to see clean, white grout instead of thinking I was going to catch something if I put anything on the counter unprotected.

It’s one area at a time, learning the quirks and idiosyncrasies of my new digs. It’s like Kitte said, “If you do it, you know it’s clean.”

Anyone have any thoughts on cleaning grout? I’d love to hear your take on how you make sure your grout stays clean and free of ‘funk’.