cleaning hard wood floor

Hi Lucky
I have three levels of hardwood flooring so I have a lot of experience. Hardwood needs special care and water is the enemy of it. Be sure not to leave wet boots etc on it and clean up spills immediately. You can get boot trays in lots of stores like Walmart. When you clean you should use a hardwood floor cleaner and a microfiber mop so that you can wring it out well and just use it dampish. Pledge and Murphys have special cleaners that work well...use one of them and wipe up quickly with the mop. That should be it. You should protect high traffic areas with a throw rug to reduce dirt and scratching.

Enjoy your floors...beautiful and easy to sweep. They also make a warmer house than many other floors.

 

I have wood floors in my family/dining/kitchen and living rooms. We use dyson animal vacuum cleaner every week to vacuum the floors and use roomba (irobot) to make a quick clean up. Both of these leave the house pretty tidy. Previously I used to use our regular soft type indian broom but it didn't do a great job.

For mopping we use normal cotton stick mop. I use vinegar with little amount of mild hot water to clean/disinfect our floors. Recently we bought hoover wet vacuum. It seem to do a decent job better than hand mopping.

-Uma

 

Advitha:
Are you having hardwood floors or laminate floors? They are different. Also I am very concerned about what you are doing....it can work short term but long term you will get damage to your floors. You should never use a regular mop or vinegar and water on either one and if you are using a hard surface machine there is a special solution for wood flooring that you use not the one for vinyl flooring (I have one of these machines so I know). You want to have as little or no liquid going on the floors and for this reason the microfiber mops (I use one made by Fuller) are the best option. Putting water on the floors raises the grain and the only way to solve that is to completely sand and refinish the floors which is going (in my area) at something like $4 a square foot. It can be very costly.

 

Thank you Tina for the advice. We usually don't leave water out there on the floor, thats the reason we went with the wet vacuum. This guy sucks out all the water and drys it. To my viewpoint its much better than a mop. We have both pergo and hardwood, but even our previous owners used to use vinegar and water.

 

Hi Lucky_Bandi,
I am soon going to an apartment with hardwood floors.so i was researching how to clean
the hardwood floors. I came across the telemarketing add of a "swivel sweepr G2", and thinking of buying one.It is a sweeper, electric broom-type device.you can buy that from target which costs $40. you can buy from amazon, costs $30. you can read the reviews at amazon.One major complaint is about battery quickly losing charge and not lasting very long, then need to be replaced.Steam mop is another option for cleaning hardwood floors. I guess steam mop can be used instead of wet vaccum.
Since i haven't used any, i am not sure which is the best one.

 

Hardwood floors cannot to be washed daily like Indian floors. For daily cleaning a low cost swiffer is adequate combined with broom or vac as needed.