keeping my dagnabbid floors clean
December 10, 2015 5:04 PM   Subscribe

i have painted cement floors that i can't keep clean.

i live in a loft. the floors are black painted cement. it's full of inconsistencies - divots, bumps, ridges, etc. i find myself sweeping constantly (at least daily for trafficked areas - and i am the only one living here), but it seems to have little impact on how dirty/clean my floors are. bits of stuff get stuck behind ridges or fall into little bumps. i sweep again; the floor is still dirty. i mop weekly.

what is the Cleaning Solution for me: do i need a vacuum? a giant dust mop like they have in supermarkets? am i missing something super obvious? am i condemned to be pigpen for the remainder of my lease?
posted by quadrilaterals to Home & Garden (10 answers total)
 
Lofts make dust, it sort of goes with the territory, and being painted black, the floor will show it. You could try a household microfibre dust mop if it's more dust than actual dirt. With the sweeping you might just be pushing it around. They're not particularly expensive and might be better for getting into the nooks and crannies.

Or a roomba, but I just like friendly robots. I don't know how one would do on an uneven floor.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 5:22 PM on December 10, 2015


Vacuum, and passage rugs, braided rugs for in front of the sink and primary food prep area. Mop after vac.
posted by Oyéah at 5:57 PM on December 10, 2015


paint the floor grey, black is super unforgiving.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 7:03 PM on December 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


You can get slippers with fuzzy microfibres bottoms. Wear those around the house and your floors will clean themselves as you walk, especially if you get into the habit of shuffling a bit. Get the cheap ones though, because you'll have to replace them every few months, as they get gross quickly and don't hold together well after repeated washing.
posted by lollusc at 12:11 AM on December 11, 2015


Yup, black is the worst for surfaces like that. If you can't paint the floors some kind of gray...

Do rugs, keep a swiffer nearby, I especially think a wet jet may be good for quickly getting spots without having to deal with mopping. But the dry swiffer may pick up more of that fine grit than sweeping will. Or a microfiber mop as suggested above. Some people just put a microfiber cloth around their swiffer. You can wash them!
posted by Crystalinne at 1:38 AM on December 11, 2015


Even better than painting the floors gray, paint them a mottled black/gray/other color, if you like. The solid color will show every speck of dirt. Mottled floors will camouflage the dirt.
posted by sarajane at 4:48 AM on December 11, 2015


If we're recommending floor painting as a solution, let me say that we recently used epoxy-type floor paint on a pitted concrete floor and now it's smooth and shiny and easy to clean.
posted by Jode at 7:09 AM on December 11, 2015


How clean have you ever gotten the floor? You might try a good old hands-and-knees wash with many bucket changes to set the dirt meter back to zero. I've found that it's more effective than mopping. If this is the problem, once you've set the dirt meter back to zero, mopping will work better.

For a particularly dusty house I used to live in, a two-step method worked great: sweep followed by a microfiber dust mop. I like this one because it's reversible and gives you two different options for dust-grabbiness. The dust mopping was kind of fun--you just glide around with your mop in a continuous line and then ogle the amazing amount of dust it picked up when you'd already swept. Doing this reduced the need to sweep from once a week to every two weeks, I'd say.

Using rugs will help. One more idea: shoes off household.
posted by purple_bird at 10:11 AM on December 11, 2015


5_13 beat me to it. My dear, departed wife used to paint her (later our) loft floor at the end of every project. Always a battleship grey. Because she worked a lot in plaster (hydrocal) there was a great deal of sweeping and vacuuming along the way. A new paint job was always cause for celebration, though.
posted by cleroy at 11:21 AM on December 11, 2015


I swear by my Roomba for keeping my hardwoods from looking like a big dustbin. Expensive, but in my opinion worth it.
posted by OkTwigs at 7:25 AM on December 12, 2015


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