To Paint or Not to Paint, the Grout in Question

I spent hours trying to find the right colors to match the hideous brown grout that was about a 1/4 of an inch thick between my kitchen tile back splash. It was a hideous and bad DIY job (and not my own thank you very much) and I was looking for a way to blend it into the background when I finally had an epiphany: “You can paint anything these days Katie, why not see how hard it is to paint the grout?” A quick look online found this miracle product only at Home Depot with a full array of colors and the results from bloggers on the Internet were five stars across the board.

This project, however, is only for the tenacious. That means all those “Good Enough” Classics, Organic Structures and Smart Structure people are going to throw in the towel unless they know in advance how time consuming it is. The paint works miracles but my dark brown and wide grout needed more than one coat. It also works best when you really push this stuff into the grout, rather than just laying it on thick. When I did that, it tended to be easy to peel off. Not good. But I didn’t have to be as neat as they say you should, as the stuff came off the tile even the next day with some elbow grease and the scratchy side of a sponge.

Yes, this is for those Funs, Organic Freedoms, and Smart Freedoms, who won’t really notice the crazy amount of time this will take, because the results are SO fantastic. I have no idea how long this project has taken me and no, I’m still not finished yet. There’s a super crazy part of me that LOVES seeing the difference and transformation between the new and old grout. I seriously makes the tile look brand new! And unlike painting tile, this really looks like the grout was always white. Here are a couple of other bloggers who felt the same way about this product as me and offer their own tips: Young House Love and The Frugal Girl.  I can’t wait to do my bathroom floor, my front hall floor, and my shower! Frankly, painting grout is almost meditative.