The Steamer

True confession: I have fallen in love with a home cleaning device. You won't hear me say that often - I personally detest cleaning the house. Unfortunately I like living in a clean house, so I have had only two options . . . get over my aversion to housework, or hire someone else to do it.

When I was working fulltime, I hired someone else to do it. The appointed person usually did a good job for the first few months, then started to slack off as time went on. About the time I noticed waxed-over dirt on the dining room floor, and cobwebs in most of the high corners of the house, I'd let that person go and try it myself for a month or two before hiring someone else. Et cetera, et cetera.

When I retired from my fulltime job, I couldn't justify hiring a cleaning service anymore. I mean, I was theoretically home much of the time, so why did I need someone to come in and clean my house? Drat. The house hasn't been so clean lately, although in reality it's probably as clean as it was when I was having someone else do it. The problem is it's not clean the way I want it to be, and I have no one to blame.

We were visiting our friends in Denver and getting their home ready for 31 people for sit-down Hanukkah dinner, when Yasmin, one of the daughters, pulled out this machine and started running it over the hardwood floors. Everywhere she went, she sprayed a cleaner on the floor, not even bothering to bend down, and then ran the machine over it. Steam came up, and the floor behind the machine was clean, shiny, and beautiful. It didn't even look wet. "What the heck is that?" I asked.

It was a steam cleaner, and I bought one immediately after I got home. Here's the link on Amazon. You sweep or vacuum the floor first, and then you spray with a good cleaning product, like Method, and run the steamer over the floor to wash and deep-clean it. The linoleum in my kitchen, which is seriously trashed and really needs to be replaced, hasn't been so clean since it was new 20 years ago. I mean the corners and edges too. The hardwood in the dining room, the victim of the wax-over-dirt disaster, is starting to look great. A few more passes with the steamer and I should have most of the old wax, as well as the dirt under it, up and out. Couldn't be easier.

Forget mops. Forget getting down on your knees and scubbing. I'm sold on my new love!