How to Clean Your Floors (and a mascara review)

Hey Y'all!

Merry Christmas! I'm pretty sure this will be my last blog post for a while, so I'm going to make it a double-feature extravaganza.

As I may have mentioned (HA!) in a past post or two, this house was pretty dirty when I moved in. Almost everything has been cleaned thoroughly, but the dining room floor has been an especially tedious process. It's all little parquet wood tiles and the room is about 10x11 and I have touched almost every single tile (I'm not quite done yet) so to say that I've been at this for weeks is not an exaggeration. For some reason the floor has a grayish dirt layer on top of it that will NOT come off with just a mop because life is not that simple. So here's what I've been doing to my floor.

First, I made a Christmas Music station on Pandora based on "Santa Baby". I love this song. I also love "Baby It's Cold Outside", but I decided this year that I abhor "Silver Bells". No matter who you are you sound drunk when you sing it, and it's annoying. Anyway, I've cranked up the tunes.

Murphy Oil Soap was definitely useful, at least for the low traffic parts of the floor. I got a bucket of hot water, put in about 3 times as much soap as called for, and scrubbed the floor with a Scotch Brite pad until the crap came up. This was great, until it stopped working.

The next best thing to do was take a small towel, get it wet with very hot water, and lay it on the floor to loosen up the dirt.Then I took my very sturdy angled putty knife and started scraping the stuff off the floor. Here's an action shot!
Look at those big honkin' veins in my hand. Gross! Now you take all of that crap you scraped up and sweep it into a dustpan.
This is the best picture I've got of how this works. Do you seen the floor up by the broom? The sort of green part? That's the dirt I'm talking about. When you scrape it off you can see how pretty the floor is! Totally worth it!
A little mascara never hurts anybody when you're doing backbreaking boring work like this. I got this L'oreal Double Extend Beauty Tubes mascara at CVS the other day - buy one get one 1/2 off, so I picked up the color juice lipgloss too. Both are fantastic. The mascara is cool because you can take it off with just warm water and it comes off in freaky little tubes that look like little pieces of used pencil eraser. It also looks like I have really long fake eyelashes and doesn't smudge or flake. I love this stuff. I also appreciate anything that comes off easily these days....

Back to work!
Here's how it's going. Towards the right side of the picture you can see the darker wood- that's what hasn't been cleaned yet. But the left side of the picture is clean. I'm almost done!

Once I'm finished I'll vacuum the floor to make sure I've got all of the dust up, and then mop it to make sure I've REALLY got all of the dust up, and after that I will use:
3 or 4 coats of this floor finish. I used this in my kitchen after I easy-offed that gross floor and the finish is still going strong almost a month later. You can use it on finished wood floors too and I think it will do a good job protecting my floor.
Another shot of clean vs. dirty. It is really hard to get the difference to come out in pictures. But it is very clear in real life what needs work and what is ready for some Quick Shine.

So there you have it, my life for the past few weeks. I hadn't done any strength training at the gym in weeks (until yesterday) because this is a really good total body workout. I'm pretty sure I'll get the floor done today and then I can focus on something else. Like painting. Because that red color is driving me NUTS!

Merry Christmas everybody!


PS. This is George. George is the world's tiniest spider who has been living in my bathroom since I moved in. I have no idea how he survived because there aren't any bugs or anything in there. He just sort of hangs out.

George 11/2009-12/2009

Well he did until yesterday when he just disappeared completely. Where'd you go George?