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Saturday, October 18, 2008

New Thing #281--Swab The Deck

My kitchen is just the right size when the whole family is here for dinner, but way too big when it comes time to clean the floor. It takes at least a half hour to do a credible job. When we got the vinyl replaced several years ago, I washed it religiously a couple of times a week. Soon the frequency decreased to once a week, and then less even less often.

Needless to say, the floor no longer looks pristine. In addition to the normal wear-and-tear, there's dirt embedded in the texture of the vinyl. Although I've tried several different types of cleansers, mopping no longer gets all the dirt up. In an effort to try to improve the way my floor looked today I got down and scrubbed the kitchen floor on my hands and knees.

Actually, I only scrubbed part of the floor. Sad to say, even though I used a lot of elbow grease and tried a scrub brush, a dish scrubby, and a toothbrush, nothing I used made a whole lot of difference. I gave up and went back to using the mop to do a once-over to get the big dirt off the floor.

2 comments:

  1. I wanted to do this as one of my ETs - but my knee is just too dodgy to even try [which is why I can't clean the bathroom any more]. Also, my kitchen is pathetically small so it wouldn't really be anything [seriously it's like 4 feet by 8 feet maybe and that includes all the appliances and counters].

    My mum is a cleaning maniac - she cleaned our kitchen floor everyday and scrubbed on her hands and knees twice per week.

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  2. My husband thinks that hands-and-knees is the only way to get a kitchen floor clean. So I've told him to knock himself out. I use a mop :)

    As for scrubbing off the in-grained stuff, we bought a cleaner from Home Depot or Lowes this summer that was like a professional-strength floor stripper. It warned you to use gloves, and protect your knees. But it gets everything off. I don't have the name handy, but it was in the aisle with the vinyl floors. I think it's intended to be followed up with a sealer, so it's a once-in-a-while kind of product.

    We used it on our master bathroom before installing new vinyl tile (so they would stick to the old floor, not to the dirt). I've been thinking that the remainder would do lovely things to the traffic paths in the kitchen, but haven't had the time or motivation.

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