(ARA) – If you are one of the many American homeowners who recently have replaced the carpeting in your home with hard flooring, you’re probably already looking for ways to keep it as beautiful and fresh as it was the day it was installed.
One of the reasons people are drawn to hard flooring is that it opens up the look of rooms and brings an air of polish and order to the home environment. Whether your floors are wood, marble, tile, or linoleum, you want them to stay clean – especially when those unexpected visitors arrive at your front door.
“I can remember watching my mom scrubbing and mopping the kitchen floor with a bucket full of cleaning solution,” says cleaning and organizing expert and author Donna Smallin. “But those days are long gone. Now, there are plenty of effective and affordable solutions for keeping hard floors clean and fresh.”
Smallin suggests the following tips for caring for hard floors:
* Clean your bare floors frequently, especially wood floors. Grit tracked into your house from outside can easily grind into the flooring as your family walks around. With frequent cleaning, your floors should keep their shine much longer.
* When spills occur, clean them up immediately. This prevents substances from staining the floor or grout in between the tiles.
* Don’t clean wood or laminate wood floors with a wet mop, because it can cause swelling of the wood. If your wood floors are sealed, steam cleaners are a better option. Cut floor cleaning time in half with an all-in-one tool like the BISSELL Steam & Sweep, which picks up dry debris and cleans hard floors in one pass, using the natural power of steam. When used as directed, the Steam & Sweep can kill many germs and bacteria lingering on your floors.
* When vacuuming wood floors, use a vacuum with straight suction or turn off the carpet-beater brush if possible. The BISSELL PowerEdge uses straight suction and a unique V-shaped foot to capture dirt along the edges and baseboards of your floor without the help of brooms or attachments. And if you have pets in your home, the BISSELL PowerEdge Pet has special rubber wipers to attract pet hair along edges of the flooring and under cabinets.
* To restore shine to wood floors with a wax finish, try buffing the floor instead of immediately applying another coat of wax. But if that doesn’t bring back the shine, you may need to apply a liquid wax made specifically for wood floors. Let it dry after applying and buff the area again.
With the help of these modern cleaning solutions, homeowners can kick that old-fashioned broom, mop and bucket routine to the curb, and tackle even the trickiest hard floor messes with efficiency and ease.
