Dying to Change the Color of Your Grout?

A few months after I moved into my house I laid porcelain tile in my kitchen with a friend and my own two little hands.  I wanted the texture and design of the tile to be the show piece so I chose a light gray grout color so it wouldn't compete.  Bad idea.  Over time countless spills, dog slobber, and muddy boot debris left my grout looking dirty and I could not for the life of me get it clean.  I scrubbed and scrubbed even with a manual toothbrush and a special "spinning" toothbrush designed for tile grout, yet the stains would not leave my grout lines. 

It left me very frustrated because even when I would mop my floor and it would be clean it wouldn't look clean.  So then I never wanted to mop my floor.  Take that stupid stains!  Okay, I don't think the stains cared very much but here's an overview of the color of my grout lines all stained up.  Those dark spots on the grout is not from your computer monitor, it's from dirt stains and it looked ten times worse in person.

 Here's a close up of what I'm talking about and this is a clean floor.  Yes, my grout was also sealed but it didn't matter...it still stained.

Recently I heard about pens you can use on your grout lines to change the color of them so I searched online for a dark gray shade, ordered six of them, and waited several weeks for them to arrive (they are shipped from the U.K.).  I immediately started coloring in my grout lines the minute I discovered them in my mailbox and I was very pleased with the results.  I must warn you though that it takes forever and a day to "color in" all the grout lines with this little thing but I'm so happy I did it and all that hard work, sore muscles, and sore knees are behind me.  Three weeks later I'm still enjoying my "new" floor. 

Below is an after picture of my newly colored floor tile grout.  It looks brand new like it did on the day I installed them and I really don't think the darker lines take away from the tile like I thought they would.  And just for the record, I'm back to mopping my kitchen floor again :)