I really need to be able to clean my house better… my house is tiny and very old and not easy to clean (original wonky slate floors, woodburner etc) and I have 3 dogs who come home covered in mud and then shed dried earth all over the house. Oh yeah and 2 kids and a tree surgeon OH - argh!!!

The main problem I have is the dog dust - makes the slates look grubby andis ingrained on the sofa and chairs. i really want to be able to clean these more often and quickly (daily would be ideal).

Would a steam cleaner work in this situation? How do you use yours and what do you have? I’m clearly going to need something fairly heavy duty - we kill vacuum cleaners several times a year.

What other attachments would you recommend? What consumables are there - i.e. replacement cloths; I imagine we’d go through a lot - the sheer amount of dirt and the uneveness of the floor would trash them.

Looking forward to hearing from you, MMx

first of all get a big coir mat and put it outside of the door. try and get every one to wipe there feet , easier said than don’t I know !! can you create a boot room type place like a porch or just a cupboard very near to door so people can change into house shoes ? we sweep rather than Hoover. we now have no carpets woohoo !! as for steam cleaners I am on the look out for one too but with so many to choose from I don’t know where to start !!!

I’m in the same situation as MountainMama and would love to see what people would recommend.  We also have an old house, and in the area that gets the most traffic the floor is not only uneven but has these deep grooves between the tiles.  Impossible to clean, and we have just one dog but she has an incredibly thick, woolly, oily coat, sheds like mad, and is becoming incontinent.

We don’t have any space for a mud room or anything like that; the front door opens right into the dining area/kitchen.  We have a coir mat just inside the front door, and house shoes/slippers for all of us, but dogs are not so good at wiping their feet .  We can’t put anything outside the door, really—there’s just a narrow pavement and then the road.

I’d love to know if a steam cleaner would actually get the grooves between our tiles clean.  If we get down on our knees and scrub them they look nice for a day or so, but in the 5 years we’ve lived here we’ve only had the time to do that twice (!).  Normal sweeping/hoovering/mopping doesn’t seem to do the trick.

We live in the same sort of house - muddy lanes, kitchen with very wonky slate floor and big gaps where the grout isn’t as high as one might wish coupled with small people and wellies and general renovation dust and chaos - and I can honestly say don’t waste your money on a steam cleaner. We bought one because I was despairing of the floor in the kitchen - it’s fine provided you’ve already hoovered or swept, but if not, all it does is push the dirt and bits around the floor as there’s no suction involved. It dried quickly, so if you’ve already swept and got floors to a good state, it will do better than a normal mop would, but if you’re after a really thorough clean, to be honest, I’d love to hear what others suggest as the steam cleaner doesn’t cut it in our house!

I haven’t used it on upholstery; my feeling is that it would probably do rather better there.

On which note, back to contemplating the general grime; we’ve been away for a month while DH has been working on the house, and ye gods, it’s grubby everywhere. Oh, how I look forward to that mythical day when we finish!

Yeah i was figuring I’d have to hoover first, just wondering f they work better than a mop as mopping doesn’t really cut it in our house - unless you change the water every third flagstone…

I really love my steam cleaner, but I don’t use it as often as I thought I would, just waiting 7 minutes for it to heat up psychologically puts me off, I’d never use it every day. What it’s been brilliant for is deep cleaning, the place we rent at the moment was covered in years’ of grime, grease in the kitchen, mildew and mould in the bathroom (including tile grouting) and all the windows. The steam cleaner sorted all this out and now a general clean is much easier without having to use the steamer. It has been good with carpets and upholstery, and killing off any outbreaks of fleas…. The main bonus to steam is not using toxic sprays etc. You’re spot on about the cloths being a bit feeble, I use rags from an old towel, it’s the cloths which do all the work really, they’re collecting all the grime which the steam is shifting. As Earthenwitch says, all the steamer does is shift the filth, that can save elbow grease but you’ll still have to mop up after to actually ‘remove’ the dirt. Best bet perhaps would be to see if you know anyone who you could borrow one from and see if it does the job for you or not. Sometimes I’ve seen people ask on freecycle.