4 min read
The mat by the back door is doing all the work
Between November and March most of what ends up on a floor in Northwest Indiana walks in on shoes: road salt, wet leaves, and lake sand. A rubber-backed mat inside the door with a second one outside removes more of it than any cleaning product will, as long as the inside mat is washed every couple of weeks. Salt is the part that matters most, because it is abrasive and dulls a hardwood finish, and once the finish goes that is a refinishing job rather than a cleaning one.
There is one piece of cleaning equipment in a Northwest Indiana house that outperforms everything else between November and March, and it costs about thirty dollars.
What comes in, and on what
Road salt from the county roads, wet leaves in November, and sand almost year-round if you are anywhere near the lake. Almost none of it arrives through the air. It arrives on the bottom of shoes, in the first two metres inside the door, and then it gets walked into every room from there.
What a mat has to be to work
Not decorative. The requirements are boring and specific:
- Rubber backed, so it stays put and does not soak the floor underneath
- Deep enough pile to actually take grit off a sole, not a flat woven one
- Long enough for two full steps, because one step does about half the job
- One outside the door as well as one inside
And then it has to be washed. An inside mat that is never cleaned stops being a mat and becomes the place the grit lives, which is worse than no mat because it is directly in the traffic path. Every two weeks in winter.
It is not only a floors question
Particles that come in from outside end up in the air as well as on the floor. The EPA's page on indoor particulate matter notes that the particulate matter found indoors includes particles of outdoor origin that migrate inside, alongside indoor sources like cooking, fireplaces, candles and smoking. Keeping the outdoor share at the door is easier than filtering it out afterwards.
Why salt in particular
Salt is abrasive and it does not evaporate. It sits on the floor as fine crystals and every step grinds it into the finish, which is what dulls the traffic path between the door and the kitchen by February. The white marks wipe off. The dulling does not.
So the order matters: sweep or vacuum before you mop, always. Mopping a salted floor is moving sandpaper around with water.
The lake houses have their own version
In Portage, Ogden Dunes and along the shoreline it is sand rather than salt for most of the year, and sand behaves the same way: abrasive, endless, and mostly arriving on feet. A mat at every door that opens toward the water is worth more than an extra clean a month.
Sources
- Indoor Particulate Matter, US Environmental Protection Agency