More Work for Mother

We bought this house eleven years ago. It had some stuff wrong with it, but a lot of things right--such as the price, location, the four-year-old air conditioning and heating systems, and the soaring cathedral ceilings in the living and dining rooms.

However, one of the wrong things is the white tile flooring in the kitchen and dining room. It has wavy edges and half-inch wide dark gray grout. Several years ago, I started staining the grout off-white, a many-stepped, tiresome chore I quickly abandoned.

But now along comes my daughter's wedding, and coincidentally, I found a fabulous grout cleaner. So I am taking up the chore again--and I like the results so much that this time, I will finish! It looks like a totally different floor. The grid look disappears completely, and it looks much less high-tech and casual. I will not lie, though. It's going to take me a while.

First, I spray this grout cleaner on the lines. It sits for a couple of minutes. Then I scrub, hard, with a brush and a toothbrush. Then I rinse, twice. Then it has to dry. At that point, I go over the grout lines with white grout paint. Once that dries somewhat, I go over it again, painstakingly with a little brush, with buff grout colorant. It has to dry at least twelve hours, then I scrub off the excess with a white scrubber. The blue or green ones are too abrasive.

After that, I have to wait a month before I can wash the floor. At that point, I will spray on another sealant because the tile has a lot of little scratches that hold dirt, and it will fill them up.

Sounds like fun, huh? But I swear, it looks like a new floor. And since my 23-year-old kitchen needs replacing, it will keep me going for a few years until we can afford that.

Concurrently, I am reading a book called "More Work for Mother," a treatise on how industrialization had a bigger influence on reducing traditionally male chores--for example, how the advent of coal-burning stoves made it unnecessary for men to chop and split wood--but made more work for women because, in this example, meal preparation became more complicated, and the stove needed a lot more care than an open hearth. Hmmm.