I’m not the most house proud person, I like my flat and I like to it look good but I’m not great at the deep cleaning and housework. I make my bed every day, change the sheets once a week, tidy the kitchen most nights and the flat is generally tidy, I don’t really dust. Lots of my other housework falls under the do it when I see it. So I’ll clean the toilet and sink about twice a week, when I notice it looks bad and the bath about once a week for the same reason. So it’s never perfect but it’s always presentable, which is fine by me, show homes that you can’t relax in for fear of someone tidying you up are not for me!

Where that tends to fall down, is with the floors. Of all housework tasks, floor cleaning and hoovering are ones I least enjoy. I come by this honestly, Ma doesn’t like hoovering either. She bought a Shark in an attempt to make hoovering happen more often, which was magical thinking because she doesn’t hoover any more than she did! 

Stef promised me that when we got married, I’d never have to hoover again (proof he was my soulmate) but then he died and I’m stuck with hoovering. In the flat, it’s been more annoying because the floors had been stripped and varnished (badly) and as a consequence, even if I scrubbed, they never looked clean. The house my flat is in was built in about 1910 and so precision wasn’t a thing and the floorboards also have massive gaps in them and nails sticking out which adds to the difficulty of cleaning them. If I have to clean the floors, they should have the decency to look like they’ve been cleaned.  In fact, one of the non-negotiables for the new kitchen was some kind of floor covering because I hated it so much.

As it turns out, I got new flooring in the kitchen, bedroom and living room, which is lovely. It looks nice, it’s all one surface and the acoustic underlay is nicer for downstairs and great insulation for me, I’m looking forward to having a slightly warmer house next winter. However, laminate really shows the dust and dirt. I know this, I’ve lived in a house with laminate before, but every time, I’ve lived with someone who was good at floors and it was one of the chores they did. This time I’m on my own.

Into this story of woe, walks my brother, the only member of the family that likes hoovering (if he didn’t look so much like us, I’d swear he was a changeling) but he told me that the most life changing thing after his kitchen renovation when they moved to having the downstairs all hard floors was the robot hoover. You know where this is going right?

I bought exactly the same make that they had, which also has a mopping function. Ben and I are very different but we are in agreement here, the robot hoover is life changing. 

I run the hoover setting roughly twice a week and have clean floors all the time. It’s not perfect, there are spots it can’t get to (behind doors) and I do need to put the kitchen chairs up so it can thoroughly do under the table (which I tend to do once a week) but it’s pretty good and although they aren’t cheap, mine had £60 off and I used some of my bonus and it was so worth it. It came with a magnetic strip which goes across the top of my stairs so it doesn’t tumble to it’s death and I do have to hoover the stairs.

I’m so happy with it, because it does a task I hate and now I always have clean floors. Worth it.