The holiday season can be a busy time in your home. You may find yourself hosting a large dinner, having family members stop by to drop off gifts, or supervising extra play dates while your kids are off from school. Because of all this extra traffic, it’s particularly important to protect your home floors during the holiday season.
What can you do to keep your floors in mint condition despite the extra traffic and food spills? Use these X easy tips to protect floors in your home this holiday season:
Place a doormat inside your front door
Boots covered with snow and slush don’t just make your floors dirty. They also carry salt that can end up on your floors and damage them if it gets dragged across it. To protect floors in your home from salt and other debris that gets tracked into your home, place a doormat just inside your front door. A well-placed doormat will absorb some of the water and debris from guests’ shoes. This will protect your floors from scratches and damage to the finish from salt stains.
Set up a boot tray
Using a door mat is a great first step to protect floors in your home during the holidays. A boot tray gives guests a place to leave wet boots and shoes
Boot tray – Set up a plastic or rubber boot tray either outside or inside the main entrance for people’s wet shoes. If you have hardwood floors, consider placing a small towel underneath to avoid watermarks from drips.
Boot trays are a great little invention where everyone can place their boots and shoes so that dirt and water won’t get all over the floor. If you don’t have a boot tray, use an old towel or even a storage container to place by the front door.
Rugs – Use area rugs and runners in the high traffic areas of your home. Hallways, dining rooms or wherever you set up the food and drinks at your party are the key places for rugs.
If you do allow guests to keep their shoes on when they enter your home, make sure to place area rugs throughout high traffic areas or on top of light colored carpets to block stains. If you must do one thing, put door mats outside all entry ways so that guests are prompted to wipe their feet.
Stick-on felt pads – A far more deadly predator of wood flooring is the scraping of unpadded bottoms of chair and table legs (especially dining chairs). The best way to protect hardwood floors from furniture is to use soft furniture pads of which there are several types on the market, but I would always go for the stick-on felt pad, which are just really easy to apply and very readily available in most general stores. However, a couple of things to bear in mind courtesy of the team at Denver Hardwood Flooring:
Stains are possible to get up with stain remover, but scratches on hard floors are another story. Invest in some felt pads to put on the bottom of furniture to keep your floors unscathed.
Christmas Tree Tray – If you plan on having a real, live Christmas tree in your home, ensure that you have a sufficiently large/ deep water catching tray under it to accommodate any spills.
Guests are not the only culprit when it comes to damaging floors. If you choose to buy a real holiday tree, protect your carpet or hardwood from any existing dirt on the tree, and even the water at the base.
Water is a hazard to any flooring—whether it's hardwood, carpeting, or laminate. But ample amounts of it are necessary in keeping a real tree alive during the season.
"Place a plastic bag underneath the tree stand to catch any spilled water," says Debra Johnson, a home cleaning expert with Merry Maids. "Don’t fret about the look: Your tree skirt will hide it." And once the tree is decorated, it can become difficult to water. "Consider purchasing a funnel to assist with adding water to the tree and preventing spills," Johnson suggests.
Tree needles can create scratches in your flooring and get caught between the grooves of hardwood or fibers of your carpets. To prevent floor damage from needles or the tree trunk as it's dragged into the house, Johnson suggests wrapping a clean plastic tarp around the tree before moving it into your home. Once the tree is in place, a tree skirt can catch most of the needles that will fall throughout the season. When it's time to take the tree out, remove the skirt and rewrap in the tarp.
Extra surfaces – Specifically for parties, ensure that there are lots of extra surfaces (side tables, buffets etc) for guests to place glasses and plates; spills and accidents are more likely to happen if people have nowhere to perch their drinks.
Clean up spills immediately
Spills happen, and sometimes people just don't listen when you ask them to wipe their feet. Is it any wonder Grandma used to cover the furniture in plastic to keep everything safe?
Johnson says you should be prepared with what she calls an "emergency kit" stocked with the necessities to tackle holiday mishaps: a roll of paper towels, four or five microfiber cloths, and a spray bottle of carpet or floor cleaner.
If anyone spills a holiday drink on hard-surface floors or carpets and rugs, remove any excess liquid as soon as possible, and then spray the spill with cleaning solution and blot until all the excess moisture is gone.
Finding an affordable kitchen floor is easier than you think
You don’t need a massive budget to swap your current kitchen floor for a new one. Instead, consider the 4 options described above the next time you’re looking for an affordable kitchen floor. Offering durability, easy installation, and low maintenance, laminate, vinyl, ceramic, and cork will give you great value for your money.
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