Cleaning Tips/Blog

This was my swiffer mop after just a couple of days of not touching my floor – Urghhhh!

I have pets – 4 cats and a dog. I clean my floors often (of course, it’s one of my jobs!). The other day – after a thorough cleaning and shining of my tile floor, I turned to see my big Bull Mastiff shake his whole body and discard a flurry of hair – literally a shower of hair left his body and rained down and came to rest on my nice clean floor!!!

During the spring and fall our pets tend to shed more than at other times of the year – it’s a fact of life, but for those of us who are particular about our home’s cleanliness, it can be irritating and frustrating. We just don’t have the time to deal with cleaning EVERY day.

Unfortunately, we can’t prevent this process of nature, but there are techniques that can minimize the shedding and also help to keep those debris-free floors and carpets.

So what is the best way to keep that hair at bay? I have read some interesting articles from vacuuming the dog (really??) to using wet grass to ‘mop up’ the hair to a lint roller (pets probably won’t appreciate this and using it on the floor will take forever), to sponge mops – try getting the hair off the sponge so you can re-use – yuk!

It takes work – firstly brush your pets regularly. This will loosen the hair, get rid of the excess and minimize the shedding. Keep up with their flea treatments – scratching will also cause additional shedding. Secondly, in my opinion, the best technique is to use a swiffer type of dry mop – as you see from the picture, it will attract a LOT of that hair, not all of it but a lot! Do this daily, it only takes a couple of minutes. It will reduce the amount of airborne hair and get rid of the majority of it. After that, use a small sweeper – the cheap ones do a great job on hair as they have no brushes and are convenient and lightweight. Doing this daily will go a long way to reducing that build up and enable you to give your floors a good clean just once or twice a week with not too much effort.

As for furniture, put on an old rubber glove, damp it down and wipe the fabric. It’ll come off like a charm.

After all is said and done – we love our pets and I personally wouldn’t have it any other way. Yes, they’re messy and they’ll never learn to help with the housework like we can train (or bribe) our kids to do, but for those of us who love animals, cleaning comes with the territory. Accept it.

Sue Prenderville
May 23rd 2016