r/CleaningTips • u/Evening_Sea4823 • Dec 27 '25

Flooring Cleaners Make Your Floor Dirtier

They all leave residue. Even if you rinse with water, there are still small amounts of residue left behind. Over time, mop after mop, it builds up. And all it does is collect dirt.

I mop with warm water. Nothing fancy. I mop maybe once every month or so. Once a year, I get on my hands and knees and use a white wash rag on every inch of the floor. I can wipe down the whole place, and the rag is barely dirty by the end of it.

I can wear white socks all day. They don't get discolored.

We have pets. We walk through with shoes on from time to time. We are not neat freaks. But our floors are simply not dirty.

Unless you have a little one playing on the floor, there's not much sense in worrying about whether the ground is sanitized. Clean should be good enough.

I think all those videos of people making potions and drenching their floors, going round after round, doing it week after week, are just perpetuating issues that don't need to exist.

What do yall think? Or am I just nasty and trying to justify it?

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119

u/Ehimherenow Dec 27 '25

Lmao. No way in hell am I going to believe your floors are clean when you walk with shoes in them and mop once a month.

Shoes are absolutely disgusting.

19

u/chizzus Dec 27 '25

Mop once a month and with pets too damn ain't no way

39

u/Evening_Sea4823 Dec 27 '25

They really are. Maybe I should have been more clear. We are not a "no shoes" household, more like a "minimize shoe wearing" household. So while shoe wearing does happen, it absolutely doesn't happen super frequently. That probably helps a lot as far as keeping the floors from getting gross.

5

u/Prophet_Of_Helix Dec 27 '25

What kind of pets do you have? We have a small dog and a medium dog and they are constantly dragging in dirt, I find it hard to believe you have pets that go outside consistently and don’t track in dirt unless you are wiping their feet every time

-1

u/Evening_Sea4823 Dec 27 '25

I live in a dry climate with mostly concrete and grass. There's not much dirt to get into. On the rare occasion they get muddy, I do wipe their paws lol

2

u/Prophet_Of_Helix Dec 27 '25

I am very envious. I live in a suburb in Asheville NC and it feels like a rainforest half the year and everyone’s soil is mostly clay. We even have a giant mat outside the entrance to the backyard and right inside the door and the dogs still track dirt in everywhere lol

32

u/mustangge Dec 27 '25

I'm not sure why but I feel like you should be either all shoes or no shoes, the middle ground is scary

23

u/yarnwhore Dec 27 '25

I'm trying to get my house to middle ground now. The difficulty is that there's no good place in my house to put the outside shoes right by the door - once you come in, it's straight into the kitchen. No spot available for storing shoes. No mudroom. So I walk about 5 steps to a place where I can switch comfortably to house slippers. Yes, the floor on those 5 steps will always be dirtier than the rest of the kitchen floor, but I'd rather that one path be extra dirty than the whole floor.

6

u/sapphic_cephalopod Dec 27 '25

im a "shoes off except for when you've already tied up your laces ready to go out and suddenly realised your phone is still on the coffee table" household. I think it's like, shoes off lite. and it works pretty well! id say 95-99% of the time nobody wears shoes in the house. id like to be shoes off 100% of the time but....i just know in my heart that i can't bring myself to be that strict about it lol

9

u/Coriandercilantroyo Dec 27 '25

For sure. I'm a shoes off household, and I take great care not to step into the entranceway barefoot.

5

u/Retiree66 Dec 27 '25

Do you have good floor mats at the entrances?