One Room Challenge Laundry Room Going Rogue
Laundry Room Makeover Update
I cant be sure what week its supposed to be in the One Room Challenge but at this point, it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter because I’m already so much further along than I was last time around.
WHERE IT STARTED
If you go back to the design I made for the laundry room, you’ll see where I began. The first thing I did was remove all the cleaning supplies and junk from the room. Honestly, easiest demo Ive ever done haha
Most all the rooms I’ve demo’d have been bathrooms and entailed removing all the cabinets and plumbing, but THIS was cake! I pulled up the baseboards and laminate and I was done!
TILING
The tile is IN and it looks so dang good!
With the help of my team (lol my roommate and boyfriend) we knocked the project tile out in a single weekend!
Once the laminate was up, we cut the cement board to size and layed it on a bed of thinset. This time I rememberd to screw the board down!
If you remember the last tiling project that I worked on in the powder room, I forgot to screw the cement board down before the thinset cured. Instead of ripping it all up, like the internet told me to, I decided to just let it be and deal with potential cracking down the line.
Once the cement board was all cured, we dry-fit the mosaic tiles and got to work installing everything and cleaning it out to prep for grout.
GROUT
This is where I really blundered it all up.
The grout is typically the easy part. It’s the part where everything looks more finished and clean.
What you’re SUPPOSED to do is apply the grout with the grout float, and after 20 minutes, you should gently wipe it down and clean off the tile. Then after a day, you clean off the haze.
What I ACTUALLY did was apply the grout and waited a couple hours before cleaning the grout. Instead of really getting as much grout off the tile as I could, I just gently wiped the tile and dipped out to vacation in Denver.
I had a great time on vacation but I should have finished the job because when I got back, all the dried grout had been curing for almost two weeks.
THE SCRAPING SAGA
I have been scaping this grout for weeks. I’ve googled the heck out of how to remove dried grout. I tried a sugar water mixture to soften the grout…. didnt really work. I tried scraping with a plastic putty knife, to not damage the tile…. also didn’t work.
So I tried a metal multi-tool with a scraping edge. I figured that if I’m gentle, I wont ruin the tile. Here’s the thing though…. it did work. It worked BUT it was gonna take hours. There had to be a better way.
So I pulled out a fine steel wool sponge… surely that would do it. And sure, it also kinda worked but it still took a long time and got rust stains everywhere. So that’s when I pulled out the acid.
I’m sorry… did you say acid?
Absolutely.
So there is this grout removing acid that you mix with water. I followed the instructions and used eye protection and gloves and all that. I even upped the concentration of the acid to really try to do some damage. And it WORKED… mostly.
It removed all the rust stains from the steel wool sponge and it made it easier to scrape. But I cant get acid on the metal or it’ll corrode so I had to use a regular sponge.
I could keep going but in the end it was the metal scraper and at least 12 hours of elbow grease.
WHATS NEXT
Great question! Part of my delay is IKEAs stock. I’ve been slowly waiting for IKEA to get their base cabinets back in stock.
I’ve already got the cabinet base in place so I really need the frame to come in stock before I can continue.
I may start building the frame and countertop for the trash drawer cabinet so that I can move the project forward.
This project is seriously going to be so cool and such a huge transformation for the laundry room. I cant wait to show you!
