I never liked cleaning. Although don't get me wrong: I like my house spic-and-span. I just really don't want to be the one doing the cleaning. Why should I be stuck doing house cleaning if I work six days a week to put food in my family's mouths?

Now I'm in this predicament. I blame karma. I find myself cleaning the bathroom almost twiced a month. As much as I find cleaning the bathroom irritating and disgusting, I really don't want to have my wife kneel down on that muck and grim. So whenever it's high time to clean up the bathroom, I go in ahead and get the job done myself.

And so I find myself at a constant war with grout. The floor tiles themselves are hard enough to clean, but add to that the complexity of the cement between the tiles, and i find myself losing. Only the smallest toothbrush can even get to them, and as if the ground absorbs the dirt inside it, I just can't seem to completely remove it.

So in the end, I do my best. I scrub and scrub at the tiles and grout, and while the tiles end up sparkly clean, I am never satisfied with the space in between. Perhaps it's the perfectionist in me (which is what makes me a good do-it-yourself person): I hated cleaning, and now I hated how I could not clean the floor well.

So there. I gave up. I did not want to clean the bathroom anymore, because it just leads to frustration for me. In the interest of continuing cleanliness, however, I looked for an alternative online. Soon, I found professional grout cleaners in our area. I talked to my wife and then began to persuade her to hire them.

I just hope they do a better job at it than I did.