Our extreme heat for the past few days has forced me to work on indoor projects. Project #1 on my mind is still the basement bathroom. (No, it's not finished yet ... but I'm getting closer.) I painted the walls and ceiling yesterday. Yesterday's item on the To Do list was cleaning the floor ... the only original feature in the room that was fit to save.
What it looked like before the demolition began.
A close-up of the filthy floor.
The floor is encaustic tile (a super hard, matte finish tile, where the color goes all the way through), and it had every assortment of dirt, crud, rust, and whatever else on it. To make it worse, the drywall guy didn't use a drop cloth, so there was drywall dust ground into the grout.
In this photo, I've already scrubbed the upper right corner.
Here is my arsenal of floor cleaning supplies.
You're not seeing things ... that IS a palm sander.
I tried the usual floor cleaning products, and was dissatisfied with the results. The crud was really stubborn. In desperation, I tried 220-grit sandpaper with a spritz of 409 ... it worked!!
Scrubbing the floor with sandpaper by hand was going to take WAY too long ... so that's when I grabbed the sander. This is definitely not a suggested use for this particular power tool. It reminds me of a teeny little floor buffer.
This is miles better than it looked before cleaning ... pretty good for a 70-year-old floor, don't you think?
It's still taking a while to get the floor clean. There are paint splotches and drips from prior paint jobs, and other crud that requires scraping. After scrubbing with the sander, the final step is to use a scrub brush and work the last of the caked drywall dust out of the grout.
I should have the floor all finished by later today. Next step: baseboard and door molding!
(written by Hartwood Roses. Hartwood Roses blog)