I have a lot of complaints about having kids, and I bet you can’t wait to hear about them. If you allow me to share just one, I promise that your time spent reading this story will be fruitful.
My three children have never been able to eat like normal people (whoever installed their interior compass put the magnet in sideways), so my kitchen and dining room floors are covered with crumbs and dotted with sticky substances. Keeping our floors clean has always been a losing fight.
If you are like me and wish that the deadening task of cleaning your floors was easier, faster, and more fun, pull up a chair… you’re among friends. As a resourceful mom and writer, I took matters into my own hands to solve this nagging conundrum: What is the best way to mop my floors? I contacted cleaning experts for an answer and got the same response from all of them.
The Cleaning Pros I Asked
- Whitney White: A busy working mom of two who runs a successful Airbnb cleaning business and is the cleaning expert behind @simplecleanfit_whit
- Ashley Dixon: Interior designer and the organizing and cleaning expert behind @alexanderreneedesign
- Kendra Hennessy: The cleaning and home management expert behind @motherlikeaboss
- Hailey Becnel: Author of Keeping It Clean and the cleaning and lifestyle expert behind @TheCleaningChannel
- Jill Koch: Cleaning and organizing expert behind the popular blog Jill Comes Clean and @jillcomesclean
Simply Recipes / Photo Illustration by Wanda Abraham / Retailers below
The Best Mop, According to Cleaning Experts
The pros unanimously agree that the best mop for cleaning your kitchen floor is the O-Cedar EasyWring Spin Mop & Bucket System.
Whitney and Ashley highly recommend O-Cedar because it provides the best overall deep clean without fuss—it is so easy to use. It’s everything you could wish for to clean up sticky floors and muddy footprints.
The O-Cedar is a mop-and-bucket combo. The mop has an extendable pole that can be adjusted for storing or lengthened to fit your height. The detachable microfiber mop is good at scrubbing stains and absorbing spills. The bucket has two compartments—fill one side with water, and the other side is a built-in wringer that spins with a foot pedal.
Ashley points out that “the O-Cedar bucket separates the dirty water from the clean, which I love—who wants to put dirty water on the floor?”
Jill adds, “The [clean] water tank holds a good amount, so you are able to cover a large area before having to refill.” However, it’s worth noting that “the top of the clean water tank doesn’t come off, so it takes a little longer to dry out” after you are done mopping.
“The built-in wringer [is] controlled with just the touch of your foot,” explains Whitney. Not having to squeeze water out of a dirty mop with your hands or an awkward lever-style wringer is a big benefit.
Other advantages to the O-Cedar mop? “It is not just for floors. Try [it] to clean showers, walls, baseboards, doors, windows, and more. I highly recommend it,” she adds.
Hailey says that she likes a spin mop like O-Cedar because it is relatively inexpensive—the mop and bucket combo with three mop head refills is about $43 on Amazon. You can machine wash and dry the replaceable mop head up to 100 times.
Tips for Cleaning Floors With the O-Cedar Spin Mop
Hailey adds, “You can use any floor cleaner with the spin mop by adding it along with water to your bucket, or you can just use water. I pump my spin mop eight to 10 times after dunking it in the water so it is barely damp before mopping. Less water is more when it comes to mopping, so your floors stay in good shape!”
Kendra agrees, “When wrung out well, [the O-Cedar mop] holds just enough water to do the job without saturating the floor. You don’t want to use too much water on floors.”
She recommends adding a few drops of mild dish soap (it’s effective and affordable) or a non-abrasive all-purpose cleaner to the water. However, there are so many types of flooring these days, so you should check what you have to ensure you don’t accidentally damage it.
Ashley says, “You really should mop your floors at least once a week for high-traffic areas, like kitchens, dining spaces, etc. If you have kids or pets you may need to up this amount.”
This leads me to the final and arguably the most important benefit: The O-Cedar bucket is light enough that my kids could lift it from the sink to carry it from room to room. This alone sold me on it, so I am adding this mop to my shopping list and mopping to my kids’ weekly chore list.
BUY IT: O-Cedar EasyWring Spin Mop & Bucket System
