Kitchen Tile & Grout Cleaning

Here's what happens every time you mop. You dunk the mop, wring it out, and drag it across the tile. The tile face wipes clean because it's glazed. But that mop is now carrying dissolved grease and dirty water, and it drops that water into the low spots, which are the grout lines. The water evaporates and leaves the grease and soil behind, right where you can't wipe it. You just relocated the mess into the grout.

General-purpose floor cleaner isn't built for the problem either. Kitchen grime isn't ordinary dust, it's greasy, and grease needs a degreaser to break its grip, not a mopping solution meant for tracked-in dirt. So the cleaner loosens the top film, the mop smears it into the pores of the grout, and a week later the lines look darker than the day you cleaned them.

The backsplash has its own version of this. Grease vapor from the stove rises and lands on the wall tile behind it, then goes tacky and starts catching dust and airborne soil. Wiping it with a sponge and dish soap thins it out but rarely lifts it, and the grout lines up there, being porous, hold onto it the longest.

Cooking is basically an aerosol machine. Every time you fry, sear, or even boil something oily, microscopic droplets of grease go airborne and drift out across the room before they settle. They land on the floor tile, the backsplash, the whole kitchen, and they don't stay dry. Grease is sticky, so the moment it lands it starts grabbing dust, crumbs, and whatever your shoes track in. That's the film. It's not dirt on top of grease, it's the two bonded into one gummy layer.

Grout makes it worse because it's porous and it sits below the tile face. Every footstep presses that greasy soil down into the lines, and the pores hold it like a wick. On a smooth glazed tile the film gets buffed off by traffic and cleaning. In the grout it just accumulates, which is exactly why your floor can look mostly okay while the grout lines read as a dark grid. The grease also refuses to rinse with plain water, because oil and water don't mix, so any cleaning that isn't actually cutting the grease is just wetting it.

The fix starts with actually breaking the grease, not diluting it. Your technician applies a degreasing solution suited to greasy kitchen soil and works it into the grout, then runs a professional floor buffer over it. That's where the real work happens, because the buffer's rotating brush scrubs the solution down into the grout lines and reaches into the recessed joint a flat mop just rides over, breaking the bonded film loose from the pores. Then the floor gets rinsed and the loosened grease is mopped straight off, dirty water and grease and all, so nothing settles back down into the lines.

The backsplash gets the same treatment scaled to a wall. We flush the grout between the tiles and clean the tile face, pulling the tacky grease layer off instead of thinning it around. On floors we can run it hot on ceramic and porcelain, and shift to a pH-balanced approach if you've got natural stone tile. Either way the grout comes back to its true color, and it's covered by our 100% Satisfaction guarantee. Not happy, it's free.

We walk through the full deep-cleaning process on our how tile & grout cleaning works page, and every job is backed by our 100% satisfaction guarantee.