Learn New Skills! Like Cleaning!

Mopping the Floor

I am not the best housekeeper.  I didn’t know how to work a washing machine until I moved out of my parents house in 2004. Everything was always done for me and for that I will always be grateful to my mother. 

During my endless hours at home I mopped the floor for the first time in my life. I am in no way exaggerating. I have never, ever mopped a floor until Monday; August 10, 2009.  

My least favorite thing in the world is washing dishes. Especially the dishes that have been sitting in the sink overnight (or, let’s be honest here, for a few days) and the water has been sitting in a dirty pot and it’s now all cold and murky. To me, mopping the floor is like taking grody dishwater and smearing it all over the floor. It just seems counter productive. So I just don’t do it.

I got the idea to actually mop while watching tv. I asked David “Do we have a mop?” He looked at me for a second, speechless, and then said, “Uh, yeah.” I didn’t know. I have never used it before. The few times (very few) that the floor has been mopped, David has done it. It never even crossed my mind that the floor needed to be mopped. 

I started with the kitchen and since everything was out and the sink was full of Pine Sol and Windex (I didn’t know...) I might as well do the rest. In doing this I came to a very sad and enlightening observation...we are some gross people. 

I am a messy cook.  Flour, nuts, cornmeal, sprinkles, all of it goes undetected once it falls on the floor. If it’s a big chunk I just call Stella and she takes care of it. If it’s small enough it sticks to your feet and then once you walk on a rug, it gets transferred to the rug and then it gets vacuumed up every week (that’s a lie, ever other week).  The floor gets indirectly swept.  It’s taken care of.

Not so much.

Some people reading this may or may not know that David is a flooring contractor and he is responsible for all of the flooring in our home* (if anyone happens to need flooring installed...help the Logans out, I am unemployed you know). And I used to work at a flooring distributor providing us with a nice discount. So the floors in our home are very nice. Probably nicer than our dirty asses deserve. 

Our laundry room, you know the place that we take our clothes to be cleaned, was vile. And, yes I am slightly embarrassed to admit this, the tile floor in our laundry room has never been cleaned. We have been in this house since 2005.  Four years, with a dog who violently sheds, and we have yet to clean the laundry room. It’s been organized and cleaned “out” but it has never seen soap of any kind. And if we didn’t store broom in there, it wouldn’t have seen that either. 

I don’t really sweep either. We have a hardwood vacuum for the massive amounts of dog hair and I use that quite often but a broom seems so...archaic. Since it has never been cleaned or swept there were some super gross things in the laundry room floor: forgotten pieces of dog food, a ziploc bag with “Stella”  written on it that I know was from 2006, empty spider eggs, dead spiders, and (sigh) a small, dry pellet of dog poopie.  

There was also a green blotch on the tile that I thought was a naturally occurring aspect of the tile. It wasn’t. The blotch is still unidentified but it surely did come off with a little scrubbing. 

Overall the mopping experience was a good one. The floors looked so...clean when I was finished. Who knew? I am not saying I am going to do this again any time soon but the results were quite impressive.  

* I did grout a closet before we moved in and it was the most horrible thing ever. It was so messy and time consuming that I eventually started crying and threw a small hissy fit.  David then took it away from me and did it himself in about a tenth of the time it would have taken me.