My husband and I have achieved the American Dream: We have a house full of hardwood floors. America right now is in love with hardwood floors. It is easy to see why. They look cool and come in almost as many colors as carpeting. You can start at one end of the room, get a running start, and slide to the other end. And if you have an old house with floors that slant, as ours do, at roughly a 45-degree angle, you can roll in your chair across the room to the TV, turn on a light, get a book, even slide into the kitchen to get something from the refrigerator, all without leaving your chair. Of course, you always have to go in the same direction.
So I understand why hardwood floors are all the rage. What I do not understand is why people spend the equivalent of their children's college education to have their floors installed or refinished, for which they have to move out of their home temporarily, and then the first thing they do when they move back in -- after saying "WHAT is that SMELL???!!!" -- is to plop down a rug that completely covers the new floor. And presto -- all the advantages of hardwood floors vanish under a rug that is a fraction of what the floors cost. In addition, they have just made their cleaning tasks much harder, and isn't that also touted as one of the advantages of hardwood floors? They are sooo much easier to care for than carpet. No more vacuuming! Just once around with the Swiffer, and you can enjoy the rest of your week! Tie the Swiffers to the rollers on your chair and roll your way to a clean floor! Well, what do they do now that there is a rug on top of the floor? They can't Swiffer it. They can't dust-mop it. They have to vacuum it. But they can't, because they sold the vacuum on Craigslist.
Another so-called advantage of floors over carpet is that they are cleaner and healthier. No trapped dirt! No dust to cause allergies! If you want to see a dust producer, get hardwood floors. They turn dust bunnies into dust Tyrannosaurus Rexes. And hardwood floors + rug = even more dust.
Our floors came with cleaning restrictions. Of course. We had to promise the guy who refinished them for us, in a 10-page legal document, which we had to sign, that we would never, ever use commercial cleaning products on our floors. Not even a Wet Swiffer -- oh! Wet Swiffers are the WORST! They will eat your floor. And especially nothing with lemon, orange, peach, grape, banana, raisin, etc. Pretty much anything that's good for you is bad for your floor.
The only approved mixture for cleaning our floors is water and vinegar. Nothing you can conveniently buy in a bottle and easily mop on. And nothing that will make the house smell like spring. More like rotting eggs. We can't even use dry Swiffers -- which ARE approved, however -- because the charming irregularities of our 160-year-old floors, like nails sticking up, catch little tufts of Swiffer, and after you are done the room looks like a field full of dandelion fluff.
So, although we love the look of our floors, we can't quite agree that they make our life easier. But then, who said the American Dream was easy?
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