Living room: Floors and carpeting

The flooring in your living room is one area of the home that is going to have the most use. Dirt from the pets and children seem to build up fast. Dirt from foods and drinks are always ground in when walking through the living room, and soils or grass from the outside are being brought in when your guests walk into the living room.

If you have hardwood flooring or a vinyl flooring there are a few special gleaming tips for you:  Sweeping daily in this room or at very least every other day is going to be necessary for you. Wiping up messes forgotten about like spills or splatters will be important to a clean and gleaming up keep on the living room.

Scuffmarks from shoes and toys need tackled as they happen. Waiting until your heaviest cleaning times in the month will leave your flooring looking a mess until then but tackling scuffmarks daily keeps your floor looking cleaner. Simply taking a wet towel and rubbing hard with your hand or a scrub brush will bring up all types of scuff marks leaving you with a very clean looking floor in seconds.

To brighten up the smell of your home you can take a quick wet mop that is wet with your favorite scent in the water and wipe up the flooring. There are many types of ‘daily wet mops’. These have attachments on them where you squirt and wipe to clean up quick stains and messes that will leave your home smelling wonderful as well as cleaning the floors.

Deep cleaning vinyl or wood flooring will consist of chores like stripping the wax from the flooring or waxing the floor. You only have to do this about once a month for a good clean. If you have a pet in the home, or if you have a large number of children in the home, mopping the floor weekly and then scrubbing it on your hands and knees monthly is going to keep your flooring shining always.

If you do not like scrubbing the floors on your hands and knees, you can purchase machines that are made to imitate this action. They look something like a sweeper or vacuum, but the scrubbing action on the flooring will bring up even the worst spills and sticky messes.

The carpeting in your living room needs vacuumed daily to keep the dirt from getting too deep in the carpet. No matter how much you clean, you are going to find stains in your carpet that you do not even know what it is.

For stain treatments on a daily basis, club soda, water, dish soap, rags, paper towels, a little clear shampoo, even salt and baking soda are going to help you out. You do not have to have the most expensive carpet stain cleaner from the store, just the basics from your home will take care of it.  If you have a carpet scrubber that you own, cleaning your carpet completely from wall to wall is really only needed about twice a year. 

The more often you clean your carpets the more stress you are putting on the carpet threads and the padding that is underneath. If you are cleaning your carpets with the scrubber every month, you could find strings and stands coming out of your carpet years before your carpet should be showing wear.

If you think you do not have to clean your carpet or the flooring in your living room daily – here is a test for you! All you have to do is put a pair of white socks on and walk through your home all day doing just your usual stuff. At the end of the day if your feet are dirty, you know how dirty your floors really are!

If you have pets and your think that you have their hair under control and you don’t have to vacuum the flooring everyday try this:

take a wet paper towel along the baseboard in your living room or even in the middle of the room. The wet towel is going to pick up a fraction of what hair, from your pets, that is on the floor now. Cleaning your flooring daily in this high traffic area will keep your home gleaming clean all the time.