I did something crazy this morning. Even though I have a perfectly good excuse to not do Thursday’s task of mopping on the days when I have my Moms’ Group meeting at 9 am, I guess I felt reckless and . . . . I mopped anyway.
And I was done at 8:45.
A.M.!!!
And guess what? Even though I mopped last week, ONLY last week, the water . . . was black.
Yep, black.
I knew I needed to mop again since my feet weren’t exactly gliding smoothly over the floor. As soon as I wrote this post earlier in the week where I mentioned the hypothetical situation of spilled applejuice, some crazy blogging irony took over and what do you think happened that very night at supper?
It was wiped up, but still, the not-quite-clean feeling was there.
So I had to ask myself why, when I was already dressed, had finished my Bible Study lesson, and was fully ready to go at 8:27, wouldn’t I mop? It is Thursday after all. So I went for it, using my recently unearthed-from-the-garage white mop bucket.
I’ve been mopping consistently every other week for several months now. But since I’ve been using the sink method, I haven’t seen quite as clearly how dirty the water gets. And this was only after one week?!?!?!?!
It was pretty nasty.
When I used to only mop on a rare occasion, the water was dirty. Of course, I assumed that it was so dirty because it had been . . . well . . . a while since I last mopped.
But this was only after one week. It was a rather messy week of crumbled brownie bites and multiple spills, but it was only one week.
When I just go on through life, without a plan for regularly mopping, I can go for a very long time. But knowing that the water was that dirty after one little week is a big motivation for me.
And then, I got even crazier between 8:45 and 9:00 and did some more daily tasks. I further cleaned up the kitchen, checked bathrooms for clutter, closed cabinet drawers, and did a walk-though of the house, putting things away.
A great reminder of how much one can get done if one just DOES SOMETHING! (I'm directing that statement to MYSELF…) :>)
Great job! So glad I found your blog. I haven't washed my floor in a LONG time. Today I was glad though because I cleaned up my bathroom and threw in a load of laundry before I went to work. It felt good to be productive.
Must have been a day for craziness – I washed windows even when there was supposed to be a cloud of volcanic ash going over us… dumb, huh? But it was on my plan and I wanted somehow to get it done.
Lately I’ve been thinking about my maternal grandmother. She used to be a very neat, organized person. Her last couple of decades of life she lived with my youngest aunt and she did all the housework. She mopped the whole house once EVERYDAY and the kitchen SEVERAL times a day. You could eat off of her floor. I remember asking her one day why did she always wear shoes inside the house (I loved walking barefoot because the floor was always so clean). And she looked at me like I was nuts and said: “I can feel the dirt under my feet every time I walk, I can’t stand it.” I thought she was crazy. But nah, she was just fastidiously clean.
Yaaay!! (Sorry, reading backwards like everyone else!)
If you’re still having this issue though, maybe check your mop? How much dirt is embedded on it that comes out in the water every time? I tried once to get the mop itself clean… I went through three buckets of water before I got bored! (I’d intended to get to the point where I’d put the mop in the bucket and the water would stay clean — and the three buckets were after several goes mushing it around to get all the dirt out, wringing it out and trying again.) Note to self for future reference: buy a new mop-head every year.
Floors. I can find a gazillion, maybe 2 gazillion reasons not to mop the floors. At least I’m sweeping more regularly and the dishes are mostly under control. Sometimes on weekends I let them lapse but it now it annoys me when there is no bench space. The dirty floors annoy me too, but not enough to motivate me to clean them. I wonder if that will change when there is less stuff for me to be stressing about.
I am so proud of you and so happy for you!!!