squeaky clean

Okay, I can finally (now that a solution is in sight) admit it:  I hardly ever mop my kitchen floor.

Until now, that is.  I sweep it regularly (okay, actually Sugar does that now) and spot wipe when something spills, but it only sees (used to see) water a couple of times a year, if that.  *blush*

Why?  Well, for one the floor is enormous and convoluted - the linoleum branches out every which way, into the (tiny, cramped) bathroom, into the stairway, back into multitudinous corners in the heavily-used (read:  the floor is unavailable under miscellaneous abandoned flotsam) "back kitchen" ... and trying to figure out where to start with the bucket so that I don't mop myself into a corner has just somehow proven insurmountable.

Until now.

About a year ago, I pitched my ancient sponge mop and bought (no, not a landfill-filling Swiffer) a swivel mop head, three heavy washable terrycloth covers, and some super-duper cleaning solution from The Clean Team.  I used it right away to mop my kitchen floor.  I loved it because the large mop head covers so much ground.

But ... my supplies languished in my laundry room .... for months .... because I still had not solved the bucket problem.  In fact, it was even worse, because it wasn't a matter of dipping my mop in a bucket that I drag along behind me - now I was supposed to work from the kitchen sink, removing the mop cover and partially wringing it out every time I need more moisture/cleaner.  Yuck.

Now, my solution is so simple that I really should have thought of it long ago, and lots of people smarter than me have probably been doing this for generations, but for me it is truly is earth-shattering.  Remember those "peri-bottles" they give you when you have a baby, to rinse off "down there"?  Well, I put a squirt of my cleaning concentrate in one of those (leaving the other three for bathtub toys), fill 'er up with water, and then .... carry that with me, instead of dragging a bucket.  I start wherever I want to with a damp mop cover, squirt solution on the floor, mop it up, move on, squirt, mop, repeat.

Pure magic.

And I may, for the first time in my life, have a kitchen floor we could eat off of.  (Not that it's stopped the toddlers among us for all these years ..... )