Mikey P
Administrator
According to Tom King.
Tom King from Minden Nevada was referred by his ultra picky neighbor to have me come out to look at his blotchy grout situation.
Visit #1
Tom is in his 70's and has worked for IBM, the Seattle public school system, Tahoe Ridge Winery, multiple ranches as a farm hand and a handful of other gigs all up and down the western seaboard. Most recently as a partner of the failed low end Winery, which almost bankrupted him as the Nevada board of hooch is making him responsible for properly and legally disposing of all the unsold wines. Which is essentially dumping it all down the toilet, without getting the spirits mafia showing up at your doorstep in this state.
Needles to say my free estimate turned into a 2 hour male bonding session because much like Tom of Indiana, the Kings LOVE to talk.
I honestly didn't expect him to go for my $575 bid to clean and seal his dinning rm, kitchen, hall and two baths and $125 to patch a long wall to wall crack in the gout, what with retirement budget, booze mafia threats and so on..
I get a call a few days after leaving the bid from Tom who wants to know more about protecting his MDF baseboards. I gave him all the worse case scenarios during the first visit so now he was paranoid, after explaining the silicone process again, he asks me how much if I do it..
Visit # 2.
Two hours applying the silicone and probably another hour and a half of male bonding.
Visit #3,
Three days later. After an alkaline cleaning and hand scrubbing the grout still looks like hell, very blotchy and it becomes apparent that many repairs were done to the floor, both by the builder before he moved in and a warranty supplied handy man for cracks that developed afterwards..
So I went over the whole floor again with an acid. I figured with all the fizzing that was going on it should dry up nice.
Its now obvious that there are lots of cracks to fix as well as a few areas where the handyman used the wrong color grout that I thought about skim coating with SGA. I left my grout charts so Mrs King could pick the correct color and report back so that I could go by Home Depot in the AM and grab grout in both sanded and un-sanded.
Visit #4
While at Home Depot I noticed that Polyblend/Custom is now offering a Color Seal product. I grabbed a bottle guessing it may come in handy to cover any potential stains.
and good gawd were there ever stains. The whole floor looked horrible. Four shades of grout and just a mess of deep staining going on. So I tried the color seal in the kitchen and seeing how it's been years since I've color sealed anything, I sort of forgot how it goes down very uneven but dries nice and consistent. I wasn't to sure about this stuff so I tried mixing unsanded and SGA to try and skim coat but one half of the epoxy is white and it really messed with the color of the grout.
So I fill as many holes and cracks with sanded as possible with a grout and Acrylic Admix product that I always keep on the truck. I tried skim coating with it and I start to realize that the whole floor really needs to be color sealed.
"Well Tom, remember the trip to Paris you wanted to take your wife on this summer? I think you may be sitting in your dinning room drinking your cheap wine and staring at your grout instead...."
By day 4 we are the best of buds and ripping jokes and farts just like old high school buddies together.. "Yeah, I sort of figured that, he says.... Not asking the prices he gives me the go ahead.
I send him to Home Depot to get more color seal and more rags. Luckily I still had my Knee Cart in the van. He gave me the go ahead to ransack his bathroom to find a toothbrush and the kitchen for a bowl while he ran the errand. Like I said, it's been years so it took me a few to get the hang of applying color seal again. I really missed my Grout Perfect applicator brush/bottle gizmo but the toothbrush would make do.
When Tom returned I laid out the rules.."Tom if Im going to do this, you're going to have to share your WiFi password with me so I can listen to music on my phone." We tried to hook me up yesterday but he couldn't get the password right and didn't want to bother his wife at work.
He lives in a cell signal dead zone so you'd think he would have it written down somewhere, but he's in his 70's and I was just impressed that he knew how to use the OK Google feature on his Samsung.
Turns out that the "ZannySquirel876" password was not quite right, I nearly lost it when I heard him spelling out squirrel on the phone while his wife gave him all the possible options that she too was not so sure on.
7 attempts later I got it to work. and off go the damn Facebook alerts.
Lots of great tunes play back drop to 5 more hours of conversation with my new buddy. The grout is coming out PERFECT but Im growing tired when the wife shows up at 5:30. He tries to get her to go out to dinner so I can continue to work but she aint up for it. I agree to finish up the hall and return tomorrow for visit # 5.
It's slow here so what the hell. The neighbors are watching and waiting to see the results. Turns out she is the In House travel agent for the capitol building and all of it's staff, from the governor on down. She was pretty damn happy with the job and wants to spread the word at work....
Grout is not carpet. Flaws can not be fixed or hid with a mist of peroxide or re-grooming with a rake. Be prepared, carry lots of tools and learn to repair and recolor.
Or be prepared to have a golf course gated community and the capitol build's staff hear all about your failures.
Tom even got to to watch me tear up when I told him about buying my dad his last cup of Starbucks on his deathbed.
I wonder what tomorrow's visit has in store....
Tom King from Minden Nevada was referred by his ultra picky neighbor to have me come out to look at his blotchy grout situation.
Visit #1
Tom is in his 70's and has worked for IBM, the Seattle public school system, Tahoe Ridge Winery, multiple ranches as a farm hand and a handful of other gigs all up and down the western seaboard. Most recently as a partner of the failed low end Winery, which almost bankrupted him as the Nevada board of hooch is making him responsible for properly and legally disposing of all the unsold wines. Which is essentially dumping it all down the toilet, without getting the spirits mafia showing up at your doorstep in this state.
Needles to say my free estimate turned into a 2 hour male bonding session because much like Tom of Indiana, the Kings LOVE to talk.
I honestly didn't expect him to go for my $575 bid to clean and seal his dinning rm, kitchen, hall and two baths and $125 to patch a long wall to wall crack in the gout, what with retirement budget, booze mafia threats and so on..
I get a call a few days after leaving the bid from Tom who wants to know more about protecting his MDF baseboards. I gave him all the worse case scenarios during the first visit so now he was paranoid, after explaining the silicone process again, he asks me how much if I do it..
Visit # 2.
Two hours applying the silicone and probably another hour and a half of male bonding.
Visit #3,
Three days later. After an alkaline cleaning and hand scrubbing the grout still looks like hell, very blotchy and it becomes apparent that many repairs were done to the floor, both by the builder before he moved in and a warranty supplied handy man for cracks that developed afterwards..
So I went over the whole floor again with an acid. I figured with all the fizzing that was going on it should dry up nice.
Its now obvious that there are lots of cracks to fix as well as a few areas where the handyman used the wrong color grout that I thought about skim coating with SGA. I left my grout charts so Mrs King could pick the correct color and report back so that I could go by Home Depot in the AM and grab grout in both sanded and un-sanded.
Visit #4
While at Home Depot I noticed that Polyblend/Custom is now offering a Color Seal product. I grabbed a bottle guessing it may come in handy to cover any potential stains.
and good gawd were there ever stains. The whole floor looked horrible. Four shades of grout and just a mess of deep staining going on. So I tried the color seal in the kitchen and seeing how it's been years since I've color sealed anything, I sort of forgot how it goes down very uneven but dries nice and consistent. I wasn't to sure about this stuff so I tried mixing unsanded and SGA to try and skim coat but one half of the epoxy is white and it really messed with the color of the grout.
So I fill as many holes and cracks with sanded as possible with a grout and Acrylic Admix product that I always keep on the truck. I tried skim coating with it and I start to realize that the whole floor really needs to be color sealed.
"Well Tom, remember the trip to Paris you wanted to take your wife on this summer? I think you may be sitting in your dinning room drinking your cheap wine and staring at your grout instead...."
By day 4 we are the best of buds and ripping jokes and farts just like old high school buddies together.. "Yeah, I sort of figured that, he says.... Not asking the prices he gives me the go ahead.
I send him to Home Depot to get more color seal and more rags. Luckily I still had my Knee Cart in the van. He gave me the go ahead to ransack his bathroom to find a toothbrush and the kitchen for a bowl while he ran the errand. Like I said, it's been years so it took me a few to get the hang of applying color seal again. I really missed my Grout Perfect applicator brush/bottle gizmo but the toothbrush would make do.
When Tom returned I laid out the rules.."Tom if Im going to do this, you're going to have to share your WiFi password with me so I can listen to music on my phone." We tried to hook me up yesterday but he couldn't get the password right and didn't want to bother his wife at work.
He lives in a cell signal dead zone so you'd think he would have it written down somewhere, but he's in his 70's and I was just impressed that he knew how to use the OK Google feature on his Samsung.
Turns out that the "ZannySquirel876" password was not quite right, I nearly lost it when I heard him spelling out squirrel on the phone while his wife gave him all the possible options that she too was not so sure on.
7 attempts later I got it to work. and off go the damn Facebook alerts.
Lots of great tunes play back drop to 5 more hours of conversation with my new buddy. The grout is coming out PERFECT but Im growing tired when the wife shows up at 5:30. He tries to get her to go out to dinner so I can continue to work but she aint up for it. I agree to finish up the hall and return tomorrow for visit # 5.
It's slow here so what the hell. The neighbors are watching and waiting to see the results. Turns out she is the In House travel agent for the capitol building and all of it's staff, from the governor on down. She was pretty damn happy with the job and wants to spread the word at work....
Grout is not carpet. Flaws can not be fixed or hid with a mist of peroxide or re-grooming with a rake. Be prepared, carry lots of tools and learn to repair and recolor.
Or be prepared to have a golf course gated community and the capitol build's staff hear all about your failures.
Tom even got to to watch me tear up when I told him about buying my dad his last cup of Starbucks on his deathbed.
I wonder what tomorrow's visit has in store....
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