My home is very old. Like most old homes, my bathroom is made of tile. Newer homes come with really nice synthetic showers and generally have some sort of drywall or wooden paneling in the main section of the bathroom. But my house is unique because it still has the original tile that was installed many decades ago.
The lady that lived in the house before me lived here for about 50 yeas. During that time, she didn’t make any improvements or dedicate much time to caring for the house. She was old – which is nice, because the house is in mint condition, but the bathroom never really got cleaned the way it should have been.
For the first week after I moved in, I felt like I just couldn’t get the bathroom to look clean. No matter how many times I cleaned the tiles or how often I misted the anti-mildew agent in the shower, I still felt like something was missing or that I should be doing something more to bring my bathroom up to a modern level of cleanliness.
Then, one day as I was staring at the floor, it occurred to me that perhaps the bathroom feels so dirty because the tiles have so many cracks in them. Throughout the years, the tiles became cracked in the middle or in between tiles for some reason and the cracks were never repaired.
While I don’t think that any water ever leaked through the cracks, it was important for me to do the best I could to try to fix them. I started by cleaning them out with strong cleaning agents and a scrub brush. Once they seemed to be as clean as I could possibly get them, I laid a layer of white silicone into the crack. Then, using a wet finger, I traced the outline of the crack, forcing the silicone further into the crack. I then cleaned up the extra silicone from the other parts of the tile so that the seem was perfectly stitched up.
I proceeded to put silicone in all of the cracks in the tile until the entire bathroom had small strips in the tile. Next, I tool a permanent black marker and extended the black line of the tiles. My floor has small black and white checkers, so it was very obvious where the white line from the crack was. The black marker at least helped to mask it a little bit.
There is also a clear silicone that might even be better to use. But the white silicone combined with the black marker was perfect for my needs.
I also added a small bead of the silicone around the entire shower area where the tiles meet the top and the shower door meets the tub. Adding the layer of silicone helps to reinforce the watertight border so that water does not leak from the shower to the floor below.
I’m sure that there are other more professional methods to fix old tile, but this method was perfect for me and you can barely even tell that anything was done to the floor – especially if you do not look too closely.