Enter, steam mop. Just like when I realized my broom and dustpan weren't cutting it, I did some research. I made a list of what wasn't working about my Swiffer Wet Mop, and a list of what I needed in a new toy. Here's, basically, that list:
- I was burning through 6 or 7 pads every time I mopped, which seemed like a waste of money.
- There are spots on my tile that will. not. get. clean. They are almost exclusively in our laundry/mud room, which is also where the dog bowls are. Zuriel is a little sloppy about eating because of his Boxer underbite, and Captain is just a dunce who sticks his whole excited face in his water every time he drinks, and then drips water everywhere when he pulls his mouth back out. When they then walk through that mess and the tile gets dirty...it's become borderline impossible to clean. I scrub and scrub and SCRUB with my Swiffer and it just will not come off.
- There are dog foot prints all over my hardwood floors that stare at me every time the sun hits them, and the Swiffer doesn't get them off either.
- Every once in a while, the Swiffer leaves my floor sticky. It's not every time - which, by the way, is weird - but it does happen and it is super annoying and it doesn't make me feel like my floor is actually clean.
A quick tour of the actual mop before I show you a couple of before and after shots.
The mop came with two removable microfiber pads that can be cleaned by throwing them in the washing machine. It also came with two fresh scent pods to stick in a pocket of the microfiber pad, but I didn't use them this time. I'm assuming they smell lovely, but I'm also assuming they don't last very long and are potentially a money pit I'm trying to avoid.
On the backside of the mop (the side facing you when you're using it), there's this little brush you can snap down in to a locked position for deep scrubbing. I tried it out and it didn't work as well as I wanted it to, but it might take some playing with.
When you plug in the mop, the light above the "steam level" button starts flashing. It stops flashing when the steam has heated up enough, and you can push the button to decide which intensity of steam you need.
The water reservoir; super easy to fill and I used one tank on my whole house.
And the verdict? This thing is fantastic. I told the hubs that it's life changing, and he said I was probably exaggerating. I'm telling you...I'm not. Everything on my list is fixed by this thing, which means I'm happier and cleaning days are happier and my floors are happier. Sounds life changing to me.
I mentioned that the worst floors in the house are the mud room. Most of the blame goes to the dogs' eating habits, but a lot of the problem is also that we use the back door to let the dogs in and out (except for when I'm especially lazy and let them in through the family room). When we don't take the time to clean their paws, a lot gets tracked in. It's better there than in our carpeted family room, but it's still not ideal. Now that all our own coming and going is through the garage, we track in a fair amount ourselves through the door leading to the garage, which is also in this space. The tile has seen better days, and has slowly gotten discolored in many spots because of dirt I just can't get up. Here are a couple attempts at before and after shots, although I will say they looked a lot worse in person.
The grout lines were the hardest, because the Swiffer just wouldn't get in those edges and clean the dirt out. A lot of the floor in this room looked like that. After some required fiddling to figure out how to properly use my new toy, I started to see some dramatic results. I used the scrub brush pedal to try to clean the grout lines, and it didn't really work so I just held the mop over a problem spot for about 20 seconds instead to see what happened (this is how the manual says to properly "sanitize" an area). It worked like magic. A couple spots needed to be hit like this a couple times instead of just once, but within a matter of minutes the floor was all the same color!
The rest of the floor just needed to be mopped like normal, and the steam did all the work. Even though this floor took some extra time and effort to get clean this time, I'm hoping that it will be easier to maintain and keep to a higher level of clean from week to week now that I have a stronger tool. I also got the microfiber pad totally disgusting because of how dirty this floor was, which I'm hoping isn't the case every week. They sent me two, though, so all was fine and I just swapped them out and did the rest of the house with the other pad.
And the rest of the house looks just as great. There weren't too many spots that needed to be given the extra time and attention the mud room needed, so it went quicker and I was able to just mop all the floors with a normal vacuum-like motion in not much time. All those dog foot prints all over the floor? Gone. Dirt spots that I'd thought were stains I was stuck with forever? Gone. The super annoying black dirt that's been in the corner next to my front door since 1970 that I've tried to clean so many times but couldn't ever get to come up? Gone. And the floor isn't sticky at all; in fact, it dries really fast.
How could you possibly beat something like this? All you need is water and an electrical outlet. Obviously, I'm sold. It does smell a tiny bit like the shoreline of Boothbay Harbor, Maine, when it's steaming for some reason, but since that's where we honeymooned I'm okay with that. And my sense of smell probably isn't reliable right now in my pregnant state. I should also probably, to be fair, share that it is a little heavy to actually push around. The mop itself isn't heavy, but when it's in its steaming glory and it's doing the work, there's a lot of friction there and it takes a little umph to push it along. I used two hands (one on the handle and one mid-shaft) for most of the house and by the end my back was feeling it, but my technique may need some finessing and I suppose it's possible I'm super weak. I'm also going to give it a little while and see if buying some extra microfiber pads isn't a good idea, just to have on hand (they're on Amazon as well and not expensive at all).
All in all, I'm pretty solidly sold on this thing. Captain is too, but that's mostly because it doesn't make any noise when it's working. (For whatever reason, my 75 pound dog who thinks getting punched in the face is fun has always been terrified of vacuums).
He's still a little unsure of it in this picture, when I had only done the mud room (hence, dog bowls in the kitchen). By the end of the next room, I was having to push him out of my way because he wanted to follow the mop and lick it...and he won't even go in the same room as a vacuum.
So yup. I wrote another love letter to a floor cleaning appliance of mine. But my floors are clean! Isn't that really all that matters?
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