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Cleaning the kitchen floor


5 expert tips for an easy shine |

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(Image credit: Ca' Pietra)

Mastering top techniques for cleaning a kitchen floor is essential for keeping your cooking space spotless and fresh.

After your countertops, the floor is the one surface that will need the most attention when you are cleaning a kitchen. In truth, it probably needs a daily sweep and a deep clean once a week.

This high-traffic area comes under pressure from all sorts of sources, including pets, children, guests, and daily family life. This means everything from mud to dropped pieces of food will be traipsed through your lovely kitchen flooring ideas.

Below, a cleaning expert gives her top tips for cleaning a kitchen floor so that you can get the best results for the littlest effort.

Cleaning a kitchen floor – top tips for best results

(Image credit: Kersaint-Cobb)

Once you've considered how to choose the best kitchen flooring, ensure you keep the space gleaming by following our expert step-by-step guide to cleaning a kitchen floor below. You can keep it a grime-free zone with tips from Sabrina Fierman, of high-end cleaning service New York's Little Elves .

1. Sweep or vacuum the space

'First, sweep or vacuum,' says Sabrina. 'All floors, particularly kitchens that get a lot of use, will benefit from sweeping or vacuuming every day or every two to three days. Debris and small particles left on floors can damage floors.' 

2. Prepare to mop your flooring type

Next, mop the floor. 'You will need a straight sponge mop, particularly those that can fold up to be wrung out, a bucket, and some clean cotton rags can be useful,' says Sabrina.

Fill a bucket with water and add a cleaning agent (follow manufacturers' directions for dilution ratios.) What you use will depend on the type of floor you have.

Sabrina suggests using a cleaner recommended by your flooring manufacturer or these cleaners can be used for the following surfaces:

For marble: Gentle all purpose, diluted dish detergent.  

For tile: A strong all-purpose cleaner like Fantastik (which you can buy at Amazon) or similar works well for cleaning tile floors.

For wood: Diluted white vinegar or Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner (also available at Amazon for wood kitchen flooring.

For vinyl: Cleaning with vinegar or a gentle all-purpose cleaner is ideal for vinyl kitchen flooring. 

3. Use the right mopping technique for your floor type

Dip mop into bucket to apply the cleaning agent and ring it out. 

Note that wood floors cannot tolerate dampness so use a barely dampened mop and ensure it is well wrung out.

Mop the kitchen floor in an organized fashion, starting with the farthest most area and working towards the exit or door of the kitchen. Occasionally dip the mop back into the bucket and wring it out to release the dirt.

4. Rinse the kitchen floor

After you are done, rinse the bucket, add fresh water, and rinse the mop. Wring it out and go over the floor again to rinse any cleaning residue. Occasionally dip the mop back into the clean water and wring it out as you go. (Except in the case of using Bona or another cleaning product that does not require rinsing.)

5. Go over the floor with clean cotton rags for added shine

If you have clean cotton rags, you can go the extra step and cover your wrung out sponge mop with a rag and go over the floor to dry it. As the rag gets wet, simply replace it with a dry rag as you go.  

This is a great techniques for getting a shine when you are cleaning kitchen tiles, whether wall or floor.

What is the best thing to clean a kitchen floor?

Using a mop is a simple but effective way to clean a kitchen floor. The cleaning agent you add to the water will depend on what type of kitchen floor you have. All-purpose cleaners are great for tiles, lino and marble, while diluted white vinegar works well on wood.

What should be done first in cleaning the kitchen floor?

Always start by removing excess lumps of dirt by sweeping or vacuuming the kitchen floor before you mop it.

How do you properly mop a floor?

To properly mop a floor, start by sweeping up debris, then dip the mop into your cleaning solution, wringing it out before beginning to mop. Mop from the furthest corner of the room in sections towards the door, changing the water if it becomes very mucky. Once mopped, any solution that needs to be rinsed off should be now; again, change the water for clean as you go. Allow the floor to air dry a little before using a clean rag attached to the end of your mop to dry and shine the floor. 

Ruth Doherty is an experienced digital writer and editor specializing in interiors, travel and lifestyle. With 20 years of writing for national sites under her belt, she’s worked for the likes of Livingetc.com, Standard, Ideal Home, Stylist and Marie Claire as well as Homes & Gardens. 

The Best Way to Clean Your Kitchen Floors

Even if you survive solely on takeout, it’s impossible to avoid spills, splatters, and foot traffic in the kitchen. In regular times, the floor can get nasty, fast. Now, with everyone at home 24/7—and spending a lot more time in the kitchen—your regular cleaning routine might not be cutting it. If you need to step up your mopping game, here are some tips and products to get you on the right track.

Pre-Clean

Before you can even think about mopping, you have to sweep up all the junk so you don’t end up pushing around a wet pile of dust and debris. For Brittany Null, a blogger and mother of three in Kansas City, a cordless vacuum is the perfect solution. “My entire house has hardwood floors, so something that works efficiently and quickly is a must,” she says. “I’m obsessed with my Dyson Stick and it has a hardwood attachment I use in the kitchen.”

Dyson V11 Animal Cord-Free Stick Vacuum

Few cleaning products are truly life-changing, but if vacuuming is a daily drag or you can’t keep up with crumbs in the kitchen, the Dyson Stick will actually change your life. Yes, it’s pricey, but a variety of attachments make it easy to switch between flooring, rugs, and furniture. You can even use it on the counter!

Dyson V8 Animal

$300 at Bed Bath & Beyond

All-Natural

Tamara Day, a designer and host of “Bargain Mansions” on HGTV, takes the DIY route when it comes to cleaning her kitchen floors. “My favorite solution is a mix of essential oils, white vinegar, and warm water,” she says. Day mixes two cups of vinegar with a gallon of warm water, then adds six drops each of a few different essential oils, and uses it with a microfiber mop.

Smartly Cleaning Vinegar

Vinegar works on nearly every kitchen surface by breaking down grease and grime. Slightly more acidic than its plain white counterpart, this cleaning vinegar works even harder, so you don’t have to.

Cleaning Vinegar, 1 Gallon

$3 at Target

Plant Therapy Spring Cleaning Essential Oil Set

Essential oils are an ingredient in many commercial household cleaners, and not just because they smell nice. Some actually have antimicrobial, antifungal, or antibacterial properties. This little set brings together the best oils for cleaning, including lemon and tea tree.

Plant Therapy Spring Cleaning Essential Oil Set

$35 at Amazon

Bona Multi-Surface Premium Microfiber Mop

Streamline your cleaning supplies and reduce waste with this lightweight multi-surface mop. The machine-washable microfiber pad can be used on wet or dry floors and easily attaches with velcro.

Bona Multi-Surface Floor Premium Microfiber Mop

$22 at Amazon

20-Quart Rolling Bucket

If you’re going to make your own cleaner, you need a place to do it. This bucket is big enough to fit any household mop, and because it’s on wheels you can roll it around as you clean, then use it to store the supplies when you’re done.

20-Quart Rolling Bucket

$13 at Target

A Smell-Good Solution

Daniel Espinoza, a Chicago chef who’s cleaned his fair share of kitchen floors in restaurants and at home has a go-to product for both. “Fabuloso—the purple one,” which he dilutes in hot water and uses with an old-school sponge mop. “It smells amazing and brings me back to waking up Saturday mornings and my mom blasting the tunes of Juan Gabriel as she mopped the kitchen.”

Fabuloso Lavender-Scented All Purpose Cleaner Lavender

The instant gratification that comes from cleaning is due in part to the fresh smell in the air when you’re done. With this grease-cutting cleanser, the scent lingers longer (up to 24 hours) and it’s safe for almost any surface.

Fabuloso All Purpose Cleaner Lavender

$6 at walmart

Casabella Extra-Wide Roller Mop

No, this isn’t your mama’s sponge mop, but it’s probably exactly like it. There’s a reason this simple style is still around: It’s a breeze to use and the handle makes it easy to wring dry.

Casabella Extra Wide Roller Mop

$33 at Bed Bath & Beyond

The Maintenance Clean

I couldn’t write a story about clean kitchen floors without talking to the person who has the cleanest kitchen floors I’ve ever seen: My stepmom, Pat. Her secret, she says, is the maintenance clean. In between her monthly deep cleans with an old-fashioned sponge mop and Mr. Clean, she maintains her kitchen floors with Swiffer wet pads.

Swiffer Wet Pads

If you could have only one floor cleaning device, the original Swiffer is the way to go. The dry cloths pick up dust and debris and the Wet Pads work like a mop. While these pre-soaked pads are best for smaller jobs, a scrubbing strip helps with hard-to-clean spots.

Swiffer Sweeper Wet Pad Refills, 24 Count

$8 at Walmart

iRobot Braava Jet M6 Ultimate Robot Mop

We live in the future now, so if you don’t have someone to follow you around with a Swiffer, the next best thing is a robot. Like the Roomba, you can schedule this iRobot mop to start at a certain time every day, but if you’d rather it clean on command, sync it with your smart home devices to enable voice activation. The best part? You can map it to clean only specified areas, and avoid others (rugs, pet bowls, etc. ).

iRobot Braava Jet M6

$450 at Amazon

Sanitizing

With COVID-19 impacting nearly every aspect of our lives, many people are (rightly!) concerned with disinfecting every surface of the home, including the floors. Just keep in mind that cleaning doesn’t always mean disinfecting. To ensure your floors are coronavirus-clean, mop first, then go over the area with a product specifically designed to disinfect. Look for “Kills 99.9% of germs” on the label, or even better, check the EPA’s list of cleaning solutions approved for use against SARS-CoV-2. Household disinfectants known to kill the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 are hard to find online these days, but some industrial solutions are still readily available.

Glissen Chemical Nu-Foamicide All-Purpose Cleaner Concentrate

Because this sanitizer concentrate is intended for use in restaurants and bars, it’s perfect for the kitchen floor, as long as you closely follow the instructions on the bottle, wear gloves, and open the windows for ventilation.

Nu-Foamicide All Purpose Cleaner

$35 at Amazon

How to wash the floor in the kitchen?

The kitchen is one of the most used rooms in any modern home. Food is cooked and often eaten here, a lot of household appliances work, a lot of cold and hot water flows. All this cannot but affect the condition of the kitchen floor. It is quickly and heavily soiled, requires frequent washing, including the use of special products. In connection with this, a lot of questions arise. How to wash a dirty floor in the kitchen? Which methods are better - with the use of modern household chemicals or folk, which our grandmothers used with success? Let's try to understand all this in more detail. nine0003 

  Contents:  1. Means for washing the floor in the kitchen 2. General rules for cleaning kitchen floors

Kitchen floor cleaners

Modern housewives, faced with the problem of a dirty kitchen floor, can choose whether to use some kind of professional tool or get by with one of the well-known folk ones?

It is important for many housewives that the product not only removes dirt, but also has a pronounced antibacterial property, while not containing chlorine. Such a requirement comes to the fore in families with small children, pets, people suffering from allergies or asthma. nine0006 An excellent solution in this case would be a concentrated floor cleaner "Sarma" from the manufacturer "Nevskaya Cosmetics", which:

Please note : the antibacterial properties of Sarma are confirmed by the FBUN Research Institute of Disinfectology of Rosporebnadzor.

You also need to talk about folk recipes that help to clean the kitchen floor with high quality and quickly, if there is no effective professional tool at hand:

  1. Essential oil soap solution. To prepare it, you need 1 tbsp. a spoonful of laundry soap, grated on a fine grater, 1 teaspoon of soda ash, as well as a few drops of essential oil - citrus (lemon, orange, grapefruit), herbal or any fruit. The above ingredients must be thoroughly mixed in a water bath, and then add the resulting gel to a bucket of water (10 l). This composition perfectly launders the most difficult, including fatty dirt on the kitchen floor. nine0020
  2. Alcohol solution. Prepared at the rate of 20 ml of medical alcohol for every liter of water. With this composition, even the dirtiest linoleum, tiles and especially laminate are washed. The solution must be poured into a spray bottle and sprayed onto the floor covering. Leave on for a couple of minutes and then rinse with plain warm water. As a result, the floor is clean, radiant, without streaks.

Please note : alcohol may damage the surface of some types of flooring such as laminate or linoleum. nine0048

  1. Table vinegar. It is added to the water for washing the floor at the rate of a tablespoon per 5 liters of warm water. It turns out a highly effective composition that copes well with greasy and old stains.

If you need to quickly and cleanly wash the kitchen floor, but you didn’t have the right household chemicals at hand, you can use one of the simplest and most effective cleaning folk recipes - prepare a saturated solution of table salt. Dissolve in 5 liters of cold water 5 tablespoons of salt with a slide. Such a composition perfectly cleans stubborn, including greasy dirt from the floor, does not require rinsing and does not leave behind any stains. nine0003

General Rules for Cleaning Kitchen Floors

In order for the floors in the kitchen to always remain clean and pleasantly shiny, you should take care of them properly. And strictly follow the floor cleaning algorithm recommended by experts in a heavily used room, that is, in the kitchen:

  1. Prepare or purchase the required cleaning compound.
  2. Take care of a respirator and gloves - personal protective equipment for the skin, mucous membranes. nine0020
  3. Remove all unnecessary things from the kitchen that interfere with cleaning - for example, take outdoor pots with houseplants into neighboring rooms.
  4. Prepare surface for wet cleaning:
  • remove carpets, rugs, etc. from the floor;
  • sweep dry rubbish - hair, crumbs, scraps of paper, etc.;
  • Remove dried stains with a scraper and/or brush.
  1. Wet clean with the selected product (professional or folk):
  • first clean hard-to-reach places and corners;
  • then wash the middle of the kitchen, moving from the window to the exit and from the edges to the center;
  • in one place with a rag should be passed twice - first wet, then well wrung out.
  1. In order for the floor to dry properly, after cleaning, the room must be well ventilated.

By following these rules and recommendations, you can easily maintain cleanliness and a pleasant fresh aroma in the kitchen. And do it quickly, without putting any special effort. nine0003

Cleaning the floors in the kitchen: effective tips from the Quartblog

How to clean any floor covering in the kitchen without getting exhausted? How to effectively and properly wash linoleum, parquet, laminate and tiles - important tips from Kvartblog!

Cleaning Kitchen Floors: Tips and Tricks

As a child, I loved cleaning floors in the kitchen - it was so much fun! All that was needed was to pour a bucket of water on the floor and drive it back and forth with a rag until it got tired. Then I saw an episode of "Tom and Jerry" where they clean the floor, riding on brushes, and began to try hard to portray something similar. In general, when angry neighbors rang at our door, whose ceiling leaked, it was a revelation for me. So I learned that washing the floors should be somewhat different, and in general, it turns out that this is a very boring and monotonous task . ..

But you still need to wash them, and in our article today we will tell you how to clean the kitchen floor to a shine with a minimum of losses - both financial and moral.

The floor must be swept before you proceed to water procedures. Oddly enough, nothing better than an ordinary broom has yet been invented for this purpose: it is quick, simple and easy to get into all the nooks and crannies of the kitchen. The broom should be slightly moistened with water so as not to raise dust from the floor. Of course, you can buy a more elegant broom, however, it is likely that you will lightly sweep the center of the kitchen with it, and then you will still crawl around the corners with a broom. Well, if you just really like to stand and wave a broom, imagining yourself as Cinderella - then, of course, you should buy it. After a light cleaning, you can proceed to the direct washing of the floor, armed with the necessary tools. Which ones - it depends on the flooring in your kitchen. nine0003

Content:

  • Linoleum
  • Laminate and parquet
  • Tiles and tiles

1. Linoleum

Is one of the most popular and most unpretentious floor coverings. If you wash your floors regularly, then there should be no problems with old stains. To wash linoleum, ordinary water with soapy water and a soft cloth will suffice. Just do not use hot water: it is undoubtedly more pleasant to wash, but such a coating can crack from it. Also, make sure that water does not get under the coating itself - this will swell it and your kitchen will turn into an impromptu mountain range. Once a month, linoleum flooring can be rubbed with a flannel cloth in order to give it an extra shine. To do this, you can use special "shaggy" slippers-cloths. nine0003

Yes, yes. At least somehow you can realize the fun of your childhood.

2. Laminate and parquet

Laminate and parquet are much more demanding in care, so they should not be washed, but just wiped with a damp cloth. Since it is rather difficult to understand when a wet rag is wet and when it is no longer wet, a special mop with a soft nozzle is used to wash such floors.

You should also be very careful with detergents, laminate and parquet do not tolerate any external aggression, therefore only mild cleaners, and in the case of parquet it is generally better to do with glycerin liquid soap. Both coatings can also be rubbed to a shine, driving around them in fluffy slippers for cleaning, however, mastic should be used additionally. nine0003

3. Tiles and tiles

Such coatings are not afraid of excess moisture, so here you can finally splash around. Just keep in mind my sad story at the beginning of this article, so water sparingly even here. A rope mop would be a good solution - it will easily get into the most inaccessible corners, and also absorb excess water.

However, if you have light-colored tiles in the kitchen... I congratulate you, I have the same one. Its pleasant beige-peach color warms with its very appearance, but washing it is a continuous torment. The point is not even that all the stains are visible on it, but that they do not disappear even after a thorough, furious washing with the help of all available devices. No, the floor, of course, becomes cleaner, but... perfectionists will obviously be unhappy. Therefore, if you have light-colored tiles in the kitchen, wash them as often as possible and best of all with products that do not leave streaks. If you cook all the time and stains are unavoidable on the tile, clean it with a rag or brush, not a mop: otherwise you will have to scrub for a very, very long time. And best of all, initially choose darker tiles for the kitchen floor. nine0003

The very process of washing the floors should begin in the farthest corner of the kitchen, from where you will gradually move towards the door. It is also better to wash starting from the corners to the middle: this way you will not stomp on the already washed part.

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