It is Daily Dose of Thrifty time and we are going to share a way to re-purpose all of that mouthwash on your shelves to disinfect and degrease/degunk your laminate floors!
Two of our bathrooms have laminate flooring. We have found this to be a great solution to really getting the floor clean and smelling great! In fact, it is the perfect scent for a bathroom. It is not real strong with the recipe below! In addition, your floors get very clean, the floors around the toilet get clean and smelling nice. Not only that, but we have even seen it whiten the caulking in an instant!
This solution seems to be the perfect amount for cleaning the two bathrooms:
- 2 cups of warm/hot water
- Mix with 1 tablespoon of mouthwash
Increase/decrease from this formula based on how much you need. We recommend Listerine as it is a tough mouthwash, but most all should work fine.
Extra Tips:
- This is not for wood floors
- We also have Pergo flooring on our main level and use a natural homemade cleaner (that we will share soon) and we have not tried this as its not the same as classic laminate.
- Also, we would discourage you from using Agent Cool Blue mouthwash (or others with apparent dye) as it is intended to stain kid’s teeth so they can see where they would brush! It probably won’t do anything with the diluted solution, but better safe than sorry.
Thanks Cheap Chic for the image.
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do you use a mop to clean the floors with the solution? I have the swiffer wetjet so could I use a spray bottle to spray the solution then let it soak for a bit THEN mope it up? our floors are very dirty and need a thorough cleaning
Absolutely! We use alternatives all of the time with our wet jet (spraying the solution from a bottle) as the mop is still good, even if you run out of solution! Our bathrooms are not real large, so I just do the Cinderella thing and use a rag and get on my hands and knees so that I can really get the corners and the spots and around the toilet really clean. But if I had a larger area I was working with, a mop or wet jet mop is just great too!
Unfortunately this formula did not work for us. I mean, the bathroom smelled great, but the floors were not any cleaner. We have laminate flooring in our bathrooms and I was really hoping this would work. Oh well, I’ll keep looking.
Hi Jamie – sorry to hear it didn’t work! It may not work for all, but it is certainly worth testing. We only use this in our bathrooms, but our main living area has different laminate flooring and we use the recipes found in this post linked below. There are three different recipes, so hopefully one of those will work. It does say specifically for Pergo, but it works on all laminate including safe for Pergo! Let us know how those work for you! They will not smell as nice as the mouthwash option, but they are effective!
Here’s the link to the ones I was talking about: http://thethriftycouple.com/2010/10/25/daily-dose-of-thrifty-how-to-make-pergo-natural-floor-cleaner-3-recipes/
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