this little baby is the black & decker sm1620 steam mop with smart select technology.
i tried to win one from sometimes sweet, but that didn't work out.. so when amazon was offering it for $54.99, i jumped on it.
in our household, i am many things. randy's girlfriend. lilly's mom. and the maid. i do the vast majority of the cleaning in our place (i put randy on trash duty, but that's pretty much the extent of his housework responsibilities).
before the wonder mop, i would dust, use our swiffer dust vac thing to pick up all the lilly hair on the floor, and then use wet swiffer pads and floor cleaner to do the dirty work. but i felt like even after the wet swiffers, the floor still wasn't that clean. not to mention the swiffer refills add up after a while.. $$$
i hadn't really looked into other alternatives for wet-cleaning our floors before. i entered danielle's giveaway because i'll take pretty much anything that's free. but then the deal popped up on amazon, and i thought, why not?
i tried it out the day i got it in the mail, and i loved it right away. it was ridiculously easy to put together (randy wasn't home at the time, so i had to assemble it myself) and i love the fact that it only uses water - no special (or pricey) cleaners that you have to have to make it work.
i tried it on 2 small places in our apartment, and i was shocked at how dirty the pad was! i literally cleaned probably 24 square feet's worth of floor, and this is what happened:
can you believe how disgusting that is?? but i'm impressed that it picked up that much only using water!
the other thing i love about the steam mop is its reusable pad. my mop came with 3 pads, and since they're washable, i figured they'd last me a while. my only concern was that they're white, and as you can see above, dirt is black. so even though they'd be clean, they'd probably still look a little gross after being used and washed. so i popped the one you see above in the washer, and it came out looking like magic:
another thing i love about the steam mop is that it has a power cord. as i mentioned, we have one of those little swiffer vacuums, which i love as well. but, it has one of those chargeable batteries, which i don't love as much. our place is pretty big (about 950 square feet) and we have hard wood throughout. if the place is moderately dirty, the swiffer vac has a tendency of pooping out on me about half-way through my cleaning. at which point i need to plug it back in and try and find other ways to clean while it's charging, which takes utterly too long in my opinion. with the steam mop, there's no ticking time bomb to worry about. randy says he isn't as crazy about the fact that it plugs in, but he also doesn't use either the swiffer vac (for more than cleaning up his head shavings) or the steam mop, so he can suck it : )
anyway, if you're looking for an alternative to a mop + bucket, i highly suggest the black & decker steam mop!
**i just found out this morning that black & decker will be offering 20% off purchases of $50 or more on outdoor products with the code fallyard at checkout. hop over to their website to check it out! valid until 10/31.
alaina
