The Groutsmith

A customer writing in March 2026 said their 30-year-old marble-tiled shower came out looking practically new. Another, two days later, said the grout in their kitchen and mudroom looked the way it did when it went in 20 years ago. That is the entire business: The Groutsmith does tile and grout work and nothing else, and it holds a 5.0 average across 67 Google ratings. It is an owner-operated Groutsmith franchise in East Boston — restoration, repair, re-bonding, shower regrouting, anti-slip treatment and color-matched caulking — working Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex counties, with a stated service area running from Boston, Chelsea and Everett out to Andover, Methuen and Peabody. The site says Ruben, the owner, moved to Boston from the Netherlands in 2010 and worked in finance before going into the trades and buying into the franchise, and describes its technicians as Groutsmith-certified. The work customers describe is rescue, not replacement. A December 2025 customer had a bathroom of dark tiles where the grout had turned white with residue and the white wall grout was crumbling and moldy, and had been worried the whole thing would need replacing. A May 2025 customer could not scrub 25-plus years of stains out of their kitchen grout; it was cleaned, two cracked tiles were replaced and the grout was sealed in a color of their choosing, all in under four hours. In February 2025, old broken 12-by-12 tiles came out of a kitchen and dining room floor and the grout was redone in black at the customer's request. Scheduling comes up nearly as often as the tile. An October 2025 customer called on a Thursday, had the estimate on Friday and the tiles and grout fixed the following Tuesday; a December 2025 customer said he came the next day and repaired their kitchen tile grout. A March 2026 customer said he answered when a couple of others did not, quoted a price better than the ones they already had, and booked them a week out. A May 2026 bathroom job — buildup removed from the grout lines, protective sealant applied — took about half a day. Know what you are hiring: grout cleaning, repair, regrouting, sealing and caulking, rather than a crew to tile a new room. A March 2025 customer spotted a few minor holes after the first application and said he came back to fix them, and a January 2026 customer finishing a long mold remediation said he was straightforward about what the shower needed and what it did not. If the tile is sound and the grout is the problem — a shower that looks tired, a floor that will not come clean, caulking that has stopped sealing — this is the trade for it. Send photos the way a July 2026 customer did to settle the price by phone, and agree the grout color before the work starts.