| By :
Mark Etinger
The Short List: Our Top 3 Tips 1. Bare feet. Most cultures in the world practice taking their shoes off inside the house. This invites your family and your guests to relax, and cuts down dramatically on wear and tear to your floors, be they karastan carpet, hardwood, laminate or vinyl tile flooring. 2. Enjoy sweeping regularly as a meditative exercise. Alternatively, if you’re not the meditative type, practice your dance steps with the broom. 3. Vinegar is your secret weapon in green cleaning. A 5% solution of vinegar kills 99 percent of bacteria, 82 percent of mold, and 80 percent of germs. And it’s non-toxic! Now You’re Ready For The Nitty Gritty (But Is The Nitty Gritty Ready For You?) 1. Sweep. You’ve learned to love it for your own meditative or booty-shaking purposes, but your flooring likes it, too. What this does? Think about it. A broom is a light touch. You don’t want to drag any small stones or other objects around the floor with a wet mop, as they may scratch. 2. Fill a bucket with warm water, add a drop of castile soap and a capful of vinegar. If you like, add a 1/2 cup of herbal tea or a few drops of lavender essential oil for fragrance. You really don’t need any more “cleanser” than this. A little goes a long way--too much product will make your floor sticky. A sticky floor not only feels bad underfoot, it attracts more dirt! 3. Wring that mop out. If your mop is too wet, it will leave streaks, and might even do some water damage. 4. Mop in a figure-8 or S motion. Trust us, this works fantastically. 5. A microfiber string mop with a cone-wringer bucket is the best mop we know of. For mop lovers, it’s heaven. For mop haters, it’s as close to heaven as mopping is going to get. It picks up more dirt than other mops, and is lighter in the hand. Once you try it, we’re pretty sure you won’t go back to whatever else you were using before. But What About My Karastan Carpet? You Ask Perhaps you thought because we were so excited about mopping, we would be at a loss when it came to carpeting flooring. Not so! We love carpeting, and as a matter of fact, our top 3 tips apply here, too, not just to floors you can slide across in your socks. 1. Buy a CRI-certified vacuum. It effectively sucks up the dust from the carpet, captures it in the machine and keeps it out of the air. It’s better than your old vacuum, and will do a far better job of helping to get the most out of the life of the carpet, i.e. maintain its attractiveness and ultimately remove harmful particles. 2. Spilled red wine? Pour some salt on it. When the salt turns pink, having absorbed most of the wine, treat the spot with a 1/3 - 2/3 solution of--you guessed it--vinegar and water. We use this vinegar solution on ketchup, chocolate, cola and coffee, too. 3. Grease stain? Pour some cornmeal on it, let it sit for about 5 minutes. Then the vinegar solution! 4. Mildew? Yep. Vinegar and water, dear. But make sure to let it dry all the way, as moisture is mildew’s best friend.
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