How not to sanitize cork floors
If you need to clean up cork floors, don’t use Lysol disinfectant spray. I learned this the hard way, and have yet to actually adequately recover from it.
Early one morning, a couple months ago, one of the cats pooped at the top of our stairs, on the cork floor. Since they are not my cats (they are mainly Lacey’s and Matthew’s), I’m not usually the one to clean up such a mess. But everyone was still asleep (I go to work way early), and I didn’t want the mess to get worse by having someone (cat or human) step in it and track it around the house, so I dealt with it myself.
I thought I remembered Lacey telling me that the way she cleaned that stuff up was to pick up the poop with paper towels and dispose of it, then spray the area with Lysol and wipe it off. Well, it turns out, the floors didn’t like that. It turned the sprayed area a light color, and took off the shine. It looked bad.
So, I sprayed some Pledge wood polish on it, and wiped that on, and tried to wipe off the excess. The spot looked better (not perfect, but at least it was shiny again), but now the whole area was very slippery! I wiped and wiped, with paper towels and then with rags, but all it did was make the slippery area bigger. Wood floors are slippery enough, already, and the top of the stairs is a really bad place for floors to be extra slippery!
I needed to get to work, but I didn’t want the kids (or Lacey even!) to slip and fall down the stairs, so I grabbed a bathroom rug (the kind with nonslip rubber on the bottom, that you step on when you get out of the tub/shower), and covered the entire slippery area.
Lacey told me that this is *not* the way she cleans up cat poop, and she proceeded to tell me how she actually does it. But that was a couple months ago, and I’ve already forgotten. Luckily, the cats don’t tend to poop in the wrong place anymore, although their long hair does make the occasional cling-on get dropped here or there, sometimes. Eww.
The rug is still there, today, because I don’t really know what to do about the slippery floor problem, without risking damaging the floor worse than I did originally. I actually kind of like having a soft, non-slip surface up there. It does help me know where the top of the stairs are, when going up/down in the dark. I guess it’s probably kinda tacky, though, but I tend to care more about utility/safety than aesthetics.
The cats like it too. They sleep on it every night!
(Nermel sleeping on it earlier this evening)
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July 10th, 2007 at 8:22 am
1) Cork can be a floor?!?
2) Cork can.. SHINE?!?
3) a mat near the edge of stairs is tacky?
4) watch out for the Klingons near Uranus!
5) Your cat is named after Garfield’s friend? Is it male?
6) so how DOES Lacey clean it in a better way?
July 12th, 2007 at 9:26 am
@ClintJCL:
1. Yep. It’s softer than regular hardwood, and more expensive. I like the cork floors, but if they weren’t already in the house when we bought it, I would still probably not know such a thing existed.
2. Yes, unless you spray Lysol on it, apparently. :-/
3. I dunno. A different mat (i.e. not a bath rug) would probably look nicer.
4. Uh huhuh huhuhuh.. Mouse Burger and French Flies!
5. Yeah, because Matthew’s friend/neighbor, Xander, has an orange cat named Garfield, and our Nermel (yes, he’s male) is gray.
6. Umm. I repeat, “… she proceeded to tell me how she actually does it. But that was a couple months ago, and I’ve already forgotten.” :)
July 12th, 2007 at 11:49 am
1. weird
2. ugh
6. That’s why I asked. So you could find out and report back to me! hehehehehhe ( I don’t *actually* care, but it would be interesting… for 3 seconds. heheh)
July 12th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
6. No way man, that sounds like too much unpaid labor. You’re not the boss of me! (I might post it in a comment next time I happen to see how it’s done, though.)
I feel like it just involved a paper towel to pick up the turd, and a clorox wipe to sanitize the floor. But I might be making that up.
I wonder if a clorox/lysol wipe would hurt the cork floor the same way the lysol spray did. Might be different chemicals, I don’t know. I know I use clorox wipes on the regular hardwood floors, the wooden tables and chairs in the kitchen and dining room, wooden crib rails, and various other wooden items, and haven’t noticed any ill effects.
I think the cork floors are just a bit too porous, so they soaked up the lysol spray. I remember hearing that they can also soak up dyes from some rugs or something, so you have to put a pad between the rug and the floor. We did that in our front room anyway, for non-slip purposes.
Oh yeah, I think I might have also been a dumbass and sprayed too much of the lysol spray on that spot without wiping it off.
At this point, you probably completely hate cork floors already. But really, if you walk on them (especially barefoot), and walk on the hardwood floors too, you can see how much nicer the cork floors are.
This one incident is the only negative thing I’ve ever actually encountered with the cork floors. I would highly recommend them for rich people, or people who live like they’re rich and rack up lots of debt (I don’t know WHO would be that careless!) (*looks the other way and whistles a happy tune*).
I have no idea how much more expensive they are than regular hardwood, but I think I probably couldn’t justify it if I was actually paying to have wood floors put in. Lucky for me, they were already there when we bought our new house.