A Professional’s Recommendation on How to Clean Different Types of Floors

The floors in your house are the biggest piece of furniture you live with. It is the most heavily used--and abused--feature of your house. From pets to kids, appliances breaking down to furniture getting moved around, air that’s too dry to air that’s too humid, your floors take a beating. It’s important to know when floors should be cleaned, how to clean different types of floors, and what floor cleaning homemade solutions work best for what surface. Here are our recommendations. 

1. Let’s Start with What’s Not Recommended for Hardwoods: Cleaning the Floor with Vinegar

Vinegar is a popular and cheap floor cleaning homemade solution. It is a natural disinfectant and can be very useful on some surfaces, like glass, vinyl flooring, laminate countertops or ceramic toilets and sinks. But cleaning a hardwood floor with vinegar is not recommended due to the high acid content, especially if the wood is vintage.

Cleaning the floor with baking soda is also not recommended. It can dull the shine of no-wax and hardwood flooring. You may frequently find vinegar recommended for how to get rid of carpet odors from pets, but it does not remove the odor-causing bacteria from animal urine that an enzymatic cleaner will. If cleaning floor tiles with vinegar is still your preferred DIY solution, be sure to have the correct floor cleaning vinegar water ratio, to keep acidity to a minimum. 

2. Trending Hack: Cleaning a Floor with Tide

Sounds weird, right? How could laundry detergent make your floors cleaner? This little gem of a tip is a newcomer to the floor cleaning homemade solution list. While the origins of this tip remain hotly debated across the blogosphere, it actually works.

What many have found is that by mixing just 1 teaspoon of Tide powder with the hottest water your tap can supply, and first soaking your mop, then ringing it as dry as you can, you can make your floors shine. The enzymes in laundry detergent that break down the spots and dirt in your clothes work just as effectively on the dirt on your floors. It turns out laundry detergent works great on a lot of surfaces!

3. How to Clean Dry Wax Off a Floor

We’ve all done it--knocked over a burning candle sending wax everywhere in our panic to blow out the flame. Or worse, it happened when you weren’t around and now you’ve got hardened, dry wax on your floor. And if it spills onto a soft or porous surface, like carpet, it can quickly set into the fibers.

The best solution for how to clean dry wax off the floor is an ice pack or ice cube. Either will freeze the wax on any surface, including carpet, and make it easier to use a blunt object like a butter knife to scrape it away. Vinegar or rubbing alcohol will help to remove the residue, but be careful about using either on wood.   

4. How to Clean Different Types of Floors

It’s important to know that you can’t treat all floor surfaces the same. You probably already know that you can’t clean a carpet the same way you treat vinyl or laminate flooring. But did you know that you really shouldn’t clean laminate flooring the same way you clean hardwood flooring? Or that cleaning floor tiles with vinegar might be ok if, but not if they are ungrouted? 

For example, cleaning the floor around a toilet may require a different treatment, thanks to all the bodily fluids that are involved in the bathroom. It’s gross, but it’s really important to clean and disinfect the floor around your toilet. Every flush sends particles from inside the toilet out onto the surfaces surrounding it. A pumice stone or firm-bristle brush can remove the stains that tend to accumulate around the base of the toilet where it is sealed to the floor. Hardwood and laminate flooring, vinyl, and tile can be kept sparkling if you can get the dirt before it has a chance to be ground into the finish. 

Regular sweeping, vacuuming or using a dry mop like a Swiffer can pick up dirt, pet fur, and other debris. A wet mop weekly can go a long way but use disinfecting cleaning products to keep floors sanitized. Just be careful to avoid build-up or streaking by rinsing floors after you use cleaning products.

5. When Should Floors be Cleaned

The key to a healthy home is ensuring that your preferred floor cleaning homemade solution happens regularly. Especially since research shows that shoes are the dirtiest thing we have in our house, if you and your family wear shoes into your home, the heavier the traffic, the more a room is used, the dirtier the floor is going to be. It’s important to clean floors regularly. 

How to clean different types of floors and when should floors be cleaned go hand-in-hand. Rugs and carpets gather dust, pet dander, and dead skin cells. Kitchen floors get sticky with food preparation and dinner time. The parts of your house that get the most foot traffic, like kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms and hallways, should be swept or vacuumed every one to three days and mopped weekly. But be sure to rinse floors after you’ve used any kind of soap or detergent, and be sure to keep vacuums, brooms and mops clean too!

Don’t have time to figure out which floor needs what treatment and when? No problem! You’ve Got Maids is here to help! Our professional staff know exactly what surfaces need which cleaning approach. Special requests? We’ve got you covered. Just sign up to get a free estimate and get us started today! Your blog post content here…