Confession: I hate mopping floors. Among chores of the household variety, mopping and cleaning the bathtub are probably the ones I put off most. (I don’t really love doing dishes, either, if I’m telling the whole truth). I do love the way floors look and feel post-cleaning; I just don’t like the cleaning itself. I don’t mind vacuuming, cleaning the rest of the bathroom, or doing laundry.
On my list this week was mopping all of the floors: kitchen, bathroom, and hardwood. Our house has beautiful hardwood floors—the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, in fact. The boards are over three inches wide, some are nearly twenty feet long, and they have chamfered edges. They are lovely. When I moved in, the house had wall-to-wall carpeting covering (and likely protecting—thanks, old lady who used to live here!) the wood. Before doing anything else, my dad and I ripped up the stained, nasty carpet and threw it in the dump pile. (For someone who doesn’t mind vacuuming, I don’t have that much carpet—herein lies the problem).
A dog, cat, and two people make for a lot of dirt. I mop the kitchen floor fairly often, but I don’t get to the hard wood nearly as much, partly because I hate mopping, partly because the floors hide most dirt. (I sweep and vacuum the hardwood frequently—we don’t walk through the house with Pigpen-like trails of dirt following us). It was beyond time to mop the floors, to CLEAN the floors this week.
The difficulty of cleaning hardwood floors without damaging them is all in what you use for cleaning and making sure you don’t get the floors too wet. Our floors are old and haven’t been refinished, making care even more important.
To clean the floor, I used cider vinegar and water, according to the following ratio:
1 cup cider vinegar
2 gallons water
Wring the mop out so that it is more damp than saturated—you don’t want water to sit on the floor for very long. Vinegar is a miracle cleaner, diluted with water, it is mild enough for the wood, but is still able to clean like nothing else.
After cleaning, I mixed up a recipe for natural floor polish that wouldn’t build up on the floor, and also wasn’t full of chemicals.
½ cup olive oil
4 T cider vinegar
6 T vodka
Place everything in a spray bottle, shake it up, spray onto the floor, and buff with a dry mop cloth. The olive oil adds some shine (just a little; it doesn’t make everything slippery), the vinegar cleans (again), and the vodka helps the moisture evaporate quickly.
I read many recipes for cleaner and polish that added essential oils to mask the vinegar. I chose not to use any because essential oils can be toxic to pets, especially cats. They walk on the floor, lick their paws, and bad things happen. Simple cleaners are often better for everyone.
I’m still not a fan of mopping floors, but I do love the way the floors look and feel. I think the floors like it too.
