101 Uses for a Dead Credit Card: Number 6, Tile Grouter

It’s only February, and I have already notched up a grand total of 7 new postings on the old blog since the start of the New Year.  Not bad, considering that so far this year I have also:-

• completed the end-of-year accounts reconciliation for 2010
• had a bout of ‘flu
• written and edited a New Year company newsletter
• laid a new gravel path between my front drive and the greenhouse
• baked a Birthday cake for BH (don’t ask how many candles there were, but needless to say it was a major fire-risk)
• wormed the cat

Casting a critical eye over these 7 literary masterpieces, I really do sometimes marvel at the breadth and depth of my own knowledge and wisdom:  I truly am a woman in a million.  But do other people appreciate my hard work and talent?  Of course not.  In fact, believe or not, there have even been some complaints. Some people in ProSwift HQ are of the opinion that things have taken a somewhat disconsolate and depressing turn of late. What with all the talk about house repossessions, sky-high interest rates, egregious customer service, widespread card fraud and impending cyber warfare, I must admit there has not been a lot to laugh about lately.  Not on this blog.

Time for another brain-cell-sparing episode in the ever-popular series ‘101 Uses for a Dead Credit Card’.  Coincidentally, there is a lot of DIY stuff hanging around on my ‘to-do’ list at the moment.  Keeping the old homestead ship-shape is a challenging task, and sometimes, what with constant demands on my time from BH, the ‘children’, my tenant and the cat, it seems that I am working flat-out just to keep things ticking over.  Making some substantive improvements seems like a distant dream.

But I must banish these negative thoughts, and get back to the subject in hand: DIY, that is.  To be more precise, tiling.  The state of our bathroom is nothing short of a civic disgrace, especially the mouldy, discoloured messy stuff that passes for tile grouting in our house.  Which brings me back to my point; the dead credit card.    Obviously no normal, red-blooded, half-way intelligent person in their right mind would bother mucking about with anything as finicky as a purpose-made grout applicator.  Which is, after all, nothing more than a bit of plastic, when all is said and done.

If you are planning a refurbishment job, that is re-grouting an existing area of tiling, your main headache is undoubtedly going to be scraping the old discoloured stuff out without damaging the tiles.  I leave it for you to decide how to accomplish this; a credit card will be no use (except in payment for a Dremel grinding tool), and I consider it beyond the scope of this blog.  When it comes to spreading the new grouting and forcing it in between the tiles, the old credit card comes into its own, however, and works just as well as a grout spreader bought from the DIY store.  I also find the card corner does a great job of smoothing the new grout into a neat, even line.