I’ve finally learned the “secret” to clean floors, and it actually requires very little from me. In fact, my floors are cleaner than they ever have been, and I’m doing less work than ever (but if I’m being honest, I’m not a very good housekeeper – so I didn’t do that much floor cleaning to begin with!).
The secret? Don’t do it. Let your robot vacuum do it for you.
No joke, y’all. I am going to tell you about our newest family member, bObi – a member of the bObsweep family of robotic sweepers (who also vacuum and can even mop).
bObsweep sent me the bObi Classic, one of their robotic vaccuums. We love her and have decided she’s a family member. All opinions are my own. Read on for a full and honest review. This post contains affiliate links.
Our floors are mostly wood and tile. While we have carpet in the bedrooms and a couple of rugs, for the most part, our floors are dark wood. I remember walking into the house for the first time. The floors were brand new, and stunningly dark and shiny. That new house feel wore off after a couple of years, though…and five years, two kids and two dogs later?
Well.
Let’s just say the house is well-lived-in.
I knew a robotic vacuum/sweeper would do a better job than me, even if it was only half as good as I’d hoped, because I kind of hate to sweep and vacuum. I told my husband, “If this thing does only 50% as well as I’m hoping, it will still be doing better than me.”
What I didn’t expect was the level of improvement a robotic vacuum could bring to my floor cleaning routine!
It turns out, bObi is *really* efficient. We let her run while we’re out and about or at night when we go to bed. When you watch it go, it looks like it’s just randomly rolling around and changing direction. It IS random, but it works…and although she will occasionally miss a spot, for the most part, she gets everything!
There’s a little broom on the bottom that spins – this is great for cleaning the floors and scooping up the dirt and dog hair, but it also cleans my floorboards, gets into corners, and sweeps in that little space under the cabinets.
When the batteries get low, she returns to her charging station all by herself (sometimes she doesn’t make it – but probably 60% of the time, she finds her way home without any help).
She’s easy to clean. There’s a little drawer that collects all the dirt. You pull it out and dump it – easy peasy. Sometimes we have to pull hair or a random toy out of her brush, like you would a normal vacuum.
There are a few quirks we’ve learned to work around. We close doors to the kids rooms because I don’t trust their floors to be toy-free. We sometimes pick up the dining room chais and set them on the table (otherwise she will push them around). We make sure there aren’t any cords or legos or other random things on the floor before she runs. We learned that she can get stuck under our dishwasher (it’s just a *teeny* bit too low for her to sweep under). We block this off with a towel so there’s no trouble.
She sweeps the floors and vacuums the rugs, too (although we have one black-and-white patterned rug that confuses her – I think it must have to do with her censor, but she’ll get “stuck” vacuuming one spot over and over again).
She’s able to cross over the little floor divider from wood to tile. And she gets SO MUCH DIRT and SO MUCH DOG HAIR. We usually think our floors are pretty clean (no thanks to me, ha!) but we run her every day anyway and every day, we empty a TON of dirt and dog hair into the trash!
There’s a bObsweep PetHair, and I thought I might need that one – but the bObi Classic has been fine (and we have a long-haired dog).
So, yeah. This is my secret to clean floors. I’m not kidding when I say this thing has changed my life. Having the floors clean means the rest of the house is easier to keep clean, too – it just feels more manageable.
For more help with cleaning floors (because sometimes you really do need to clean them), check out this great post from my friend Molly about how to clean laminate floors.
You can learn more about bObsweep here. You can purchase your own bObsweep here.