Hi everyone! Sorry to be a bit sporadic with my posting lately. I’m really trying to get back into my groove but we’re having some work done on the bathroom upstairs and I have to admit, it’s definitely thrown me off a bit more than I expected it to. I have a hard time going with the flow sometimes when my routine is thrown out of whack, and this has definitely taken that routine and thrown it out the window into oncoming traffic.
The first week, I did amazing, the house didn’t get messy at all! (ha…for those of you who don’t know, we stayed at my parent’s house the entire first week…so this was a fake brag…thank you again to my family for saving us and everything you did!) So, needless to say this will unfortunately not be a post about how I overcame the chaos of construction and kept my house tidy and organized throughout it all. I wish it was, but this place is feeling real cramped and I can feel myself getting moodier by the minute. So far not triumphing in that respect.
The one great thing this post IS going to be about though is my rediscovery of actual real mopping, like soapy water in a bucket and a mop, mopping the floor. I probably shouldn’t admit this but for the past few years, I had convinced myself that my Swiffer mop was a 100% replacement for an actual mop. And maybe in some cases it can be, and still gets the job done well enough, but in our house, it was not cutting it. So many times after spending so much time sweeping the entire floor and then Swiffer mopping, I’d look at it as soon as it dried and think it just immediately looked bad again. I remember so many times literally saying out loud disappointedly “It doesn’t even look like I mopped”
I’m not sure why I let this go on for years. What’s that saying again? “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.” That was me. I think I honestly thought I was saving myself tons of time by using the Swiffer instead of the mop. Why though? It literally takes 30 seconds to put the cleaner in the bucket and fill it with water. After that point, it’s the same amount of time to push the mop around the rooms. Just another example of my brain tricking me.
Anyway, our poor floors have taken a lot of abuse over the years. When we first moved in I had continued to use my steam cleaner that I’d used in our rental that did NOT have wooden floors, completely oblivious to the fact that you can’t use steam on hardwoods. We also have a round chair that has provided my daughter with hours of entertainment being spun around in circles in, so the floors are not only warped from the steam but scratched to hell from the chair. When we look back at pictures taken from when we first moved in, we sometimes say “wow, look how nice the floors looked”.
So being honest, they’re never going to look great again (unless we refinish them), but the difference I saw in our kitchen just now after quickly running the mop over it was incredible. You know those advertisements where people use makeup on one half of their face to show the difference between the before and after? That’s what I’m looking at right now as I look at my kitchen floor. One side looks clean, and dare I say “shiny” even, and the other half is covered in footprints and streaks. WOW.
You may be wondering why I only mopped half the floor. Honestly, I just did this on a whim to be honest, I had spotted the mop in the corner where we keep all our sweeping/cleaning stuff and I was actually thinking to myself, I should probably get rid of that. It just takes up space and I never use it. But before I let it go I just felt like I had to give it one more quick try, so I randomly just filled up the bucket and gave it a go. Right now my daughter’s bike is in the kitchen though (we used to have a huge trampoline in there so this is actually taking up less space) and out of laziness of not wanting to move it for this test mop I just quickly did half the room to test it out. Boy am I glad I did.
Another thing I’ve been completely slacking on is running the Roomba as often as I should. I know what you’re thinking right now, wow, that sounds like the ultimate in lazy. The Roomba just runs itself, what’s the problem here? The problem is that when the house gets messy and cluttered, there’s more stuff on the floors (remember my cabinet debacle? That’s why there’s still stuff on the floors). UGH. In order to run the roomba, the floor has to be cleared. So, Flowersmell has not been working much lately. I’ve made a lot of progress though and am even more motivated to get the floors as bare as possible because I want to mop all the time now. Just kidding, not all the time, but I honestly am excited to mop the floors. I never thought I’d say that.
In combination with hopefully running the Roomba more often again, I also just purchased a cordless vacuum on Amazon. It’s amazing. I’ve never had a cordless vacuum before, and I think it’s all mental, but the freedom of not having to plug it in anytime I just want to quickly zap up a little mess or some crumbs off the floor feels so great. This might sound ridiculous, but I seriously have been having fun using the new vacuum. It may wear off some point soon, but for now I’m excited to actually look forward to vacuuming and having a much easier and faster way to spot clean.
So anyway, that’s my great accomplishment from this week. I’ve rediscovered mopping and have found a way to enjoy cleaning. Disclaimer here though, for anyone who knows me and will actually be seeing my house and floors, I’m in no way making any promises that my floors will be gleaming and shiny all the time. I mean, Willis still lives here and I’m not gonna be mopping every day, so those paw prints will still regale. But, on the days when I do mop, I know I won’t be horribly disappointed with the outcome at least. Happy mopping and vacuuming everyone!