Tuesday 11 December 2012

My Kitchen Floor


It's been longer than I would like since I last wrote here, but I've been mulling over some design improvements to the blog view already and that kind of tied up my thoughts and time. I'm not any closer to upgrading the look, just exploring some ideas. We'll keep plain and simple for now, pictures and fun stuff can come later.

I think from time to time I will use this space to rant a little about something. Probably not anything too deep or political, that's just not my style. But some topics may be thought provoking and insightful, others not so much. I think I will start with the more trivial side of life and discuss my kitchen floor.

Yes, I know, not a really riveting read right? Well, think again, I don't want to replace it, I just want it to be less dirty all the time.

Now, before you get to thinking that its a filth encrusted expanse that would qualify for the reality series "Looking for my Linoleum", we're not really at that stage. It's just that even if I completely clear out the room, scrub every inch on my hands and knees it's dirty again in about 2 hours. Drives me nuts, I'm not super mom or super clean freak, it just really gets on my nerves. Admit it, we all have something around the house that we just can't stand to see dirty/cluttered/messy.

Mine is my kitchen floor. Yes, its light in colour so the dirt shows more readily, but can the cleaning fairies or elves just make the dirt disappear?

Admittedly, Big C does his part to keep things on the tidy side, I've been known to see him with a broom or one of those static cloths trying to control the chaos.

And honestly, Miss K. really isn't a huge contributing factor to the mess either. For someone who it 2 she is pretty darn awesome at not spilling or otherwise having food on the floor. (Her magnetic letters and the clothespins are another story altogether).

I think my number one problem is the dog. I love her to death, but as the title of this blog suggests, she's a mud puppy. She's a black lab, so there's no danger of any type of food being on the floor for any longer than about 2.3 seconds. Her water is a  different story. The dog drinks like some sort of animal that has been deprived of water in the desert for days. Dainty she is not, water is everywhere and typically there is some sort of small body of water near her bowl. We've got a large bath towel under her food and water dish but there are always small ponds in the vicinity.

Then, there is the hair. Winter, spring, summer or fall, all you have to do is look around y'all and there is dog hair somewhere. I think she invites dog friends over when we're away and they just shed all over. She's a short haired dog, & the shedding is worse in the spring of course, but my god, we could have made ourselves 3 or 4 more puppies out the hair we've collected.

And, right now to top it all off, we're having a unusually mild late fall, early winter season. Lots of rain, not much snow and cold. So what does rain make…you guessed it, mud.

Some background here, we originally got our fur kid for both companionship and to do what she is born to do and that is retrieve waterfowl for my husband. I love the labrador breed, social, smart, easygoing and so on, nobody mentioned they are mud lovers. Or at least ours is. The dirtier, the better in her books.

I'm not saying that she goes out deliberately and looks to roll in the mud, its more like a little kid with the temptation of a puddle or fresh cookies before them. Before long they've just taken the plunge and gone for it.

The last 2 duck hunting adventures have resulted in a bath before she's even allowed to step foot on the porch, let alone in the house. The sad part is she looks so dejected when we clean her up that you'd think we were stripping her of some mud trophy she earned in battle.

And, if you've ever owned a lab, you know that you cannot possibly wash, towel off, dry or remove every last piece of dirt/mud on them. It hides, waiting till they are on your clean floor or beige carpet before ejecting itself from their body onto your belongings/floor coverings. I had caked mud on the bottom of my jeans after the last hunting day, and I didn't even go hunting??!

So, I digress a little, but all this goes to create the perfect storm on the kitchen floor. No matter how dutifully we wipe the dog's feet when she comes inside, the dirt, combined with the hair and the aforementioned bodies of water residing near the water bowl, result in the bane of my existence, a kitchen floor that no one would want to eat off of.

I try to keep it presentable, but have learned in the past few years to just get as much of the surface dirt as I can and deal with whatever else happens when I can.

Anything around your place that just drives you nuts but you've learned to live with it?

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