Renewing old grouting in tiled bathrooms / showers

We are often asked to "regrout" a shower cubicle or around a bath, because the grout has got old and nasty-looking. Customers often confuse grout with silicone sealant. Replacing the silicone sealant (rubbery substance around the edge of the shower tray or bath) is straightforward (especially now all our handymen are familiar with Stan's perfected technique). Replacing grout (the rock-hard substance filling the gaps between the tiles) is not straightforward at all. In fact, you may as well not even attempt it - the grout is usually harder than the tiles, so any attempt to scrape out the old grout will inevitably result in a lot of damage to the tiles.

You'd usually be better off getting a tiler to re-tile from scratch.

Sometimes, if there is just a small area of grout that has deteriorated, you can scrape out the loose bits and apply fresh grout. But even this isn't ideal, because the new grout will look much, well, newer than the old grout in the rest of the tiles.

However, we now have a new solution: steam-cleaning the entire area, which we have found is astonishingly effective. It is time-consuming (takes about a day to do properly), but makes the tiles and grout as good as new. Plus, if there are any areas where the grout has deteriorated and crumbled, it can be replaced without the new grout looking out of place.

Even a full day's labour (plus a small charge for hire of the steam cleaner) is a lot less than having the whole area re-tiled.

The first customer we did this for was so impressed, they asked us to come back once a month (!) to keep their bathroom in pristine appearance.

If you'd also like tired tiles to look as good as new, give us a call on 0800 426 396, or e-mail fixit@0800handyman.co.uk

Silicone sealant in bathrooms

We'd had a few call-backs recently on silicone sealant jobs. A very frequent job that we do is re-sealing baths and showers, where sealant has got old and mouldy and leaky. Removing the old silicon, and resealing with new is the sort of job all of our handymen should be complete experts at, so hearing that some of them weren't was worrying.

So, we had "silicone sealant" as the subject of our masterclass on Friday. Every fourth Friday we have our London team get together over breakfast. This is partly for social reasons - as our guys work mostly alone, they can go for days or weeks without seeing any of their colleagues; and partly to share knowledge and skills. And most times, we pick a topic for one handyman to talk about - whether it be a new technique, a new tool they have discovered, or whatever.

Stan and Don both gave brilliant demonstrations of their silicone sealant technique. Stan had a secret weapon, which he had mentioned before but none of us really understood how effective it was until we saw it in action. The secret weapon is simply an old perfume spray bottle filled with soapy water - spray this onto the silicone, and onto the tiles an inch or so either side of the bead, then (and only then) smooth it off. It is very, very effective, allowing you to produce a perfect smooth bead of silicone with ease. We'd used a mocked-up tile corner using black tiles and white silicone so any imperfections would be very visible. And even under those conditions, Stan's handywork was perfect.

So now we are issuing everyone with a little water-spray bottle, and now that everyone knows what 0800handyman silicone work should look like we hopefully won't have any more sub-standard siliconing.