BBC's 'Clean it, Fix it' star, Maxine Dwyer has shared a cleaning hack that transforms tiles. The cleaning expert demonstrated the method with just a 49p household product and got results that prompted co-star Tommy Walsh to say the bathroom “looked new" after the treatment.
We've all seen bathroom tile grout discolour and bringing it back to new can be a battle as nine house sharers in the BBC programme demonstrated. During an episode spotted by the Express, Maxine Dwyer was tasked with an almost impossible task when she arrived at the home of nine professionals whose communal bathroom was covered in mould and limescale.
Designed to be a wet room, there were tiles on the walls and floors and the grouting was varying shades of black and yellow. An uneven floor added to the problems as instead of the water running down a slope into the drain, it sat puddled in the middle, causing limescale to build up.
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The space was also poorly ventilated which meant mould had grown. It was so bad that Maxine needed to suit up for the job and take out her secret weapon - large amounts of bleach and a clever technique in applying the product. “The bathroom is really quite manky,” she said.
With goggles and suit on to protect her skin, eyes and clothes from any bleach splashes, she set to work. “What I’m going to do is smear the walls with bleach, but before that I’m going to soak cotton wool in some bleach so that I can give the corners and edges a bit of a head start - that can start working because I think the hardest parts are the corners and edges at the bottom of the walls. And I’m going to leave it there as long as I can,” she explained.
As grout is porous and absorbs dirt and moisture it a breeding ground for bacteria. Bleach is a disinfectant so it’s great at killing germs. However, be aware that if raw bleach isn’t washed from the skin quickly, it will cause a burn. You'll also need to keep a window open if you are adopting this cleaning method. Bathroom ventilation is important in reducing chemical fumes as well as condensation.
Maxine continued: “I’ve put the cotton wool along the bottom of the wall and now I’m going to start smearing the bleach all along the wall - make sure it gets in the grouting... You’ve really got to get it [the bleach] into these corners let it drip down and follow it down with your hand". She went on: "Then it will drip down to the cotton wool”.
If you’d rather not use bleach, you can clean the grout with baking powder - make a paste with water and vinegar and scrub it over the grout with a toothbrush before rinsing. Its abrasive properties will help lift the dirt.
After 10-20 minutes of the bleach soaking into the grout, Maxine then used a stiff scourer to scrub the tiles and grout. She then rinsed the tiles with water. As for where she had placed the cotton wool which was doused in bleach, she simply lifted up the cotton wool and it had removed the mould from the grout by absorbing it - no scrubbing required.
Maxine said: “It’s important to rinse the bleach because I’m going to be using another chemical [for the basin and toilet] and if you mix two chemicals up, you could have a terrible reaction.”
After scrubbing the other areas of the bathroom, Maxine’s co-star Tommy Walsh said the bathroom “looked new”.
Bleach can be purchased from any supermarket, 750ml of Tesco thick bleach currently sells for 49p, and they also sell cotton wool for around 85p.
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