I'm hunting wabbits!

Not these:

But these:

As I put away our Christmas decorations and straighten up the house, I thought it would be a good time to ask how different people clean their wood floors and rugs. It was so much simpler (though a lot uglier) with our beige wall-to-wall carpets in our last apartment. Now, we have varied floor coverings and bare (polyurethaned) wood, which makes clean-up a lot harder.

Doing next-to-no research, I was prepared to use a vacuum weekly plus a wax or oil like Murphy's Oil occasionally. D, doing much more research, discovered that oils are unnecessary and even harmful for floors. Vacuums can be bad, especially if you set the bristles spinning, which can wear off the polyurethane. Our hard-core Dyson animal, so great for our old carpets, isn't even very good at hardwood. D is a proponent of microfiber dustmops, but I apparently am not very skilled at maneuvering them and tend not to pick up very much as I go.

After a long debate, D also finally agreed that a tiny amount of moisture very very occasionally will also not kill the floors, giving me license to use a Swiffer once in a blue moon. The dry mop just never made the floors feel very clean.

He dust-mops while I vacuum our rugs, which is actually difficult, since they are small and the Dyson is large. Plus I have to pick up the beast and carry it around to each area rug, which is no fun (though nice exercise). Then I use the hose to suck up the pile of dust bunnies that D gathered. I also use the hose to try to get into crevices and corners (like under our love seat) where the bunnies seem to gather and where the dust mop can't reach. Together, this seems like a lot of work, especially since we aren't even cleaning the upstairs yet. And even right after cleaning, I start to see the bunnies emerge from hiding to taunt us. Last week, after D started waking up very sniffly every morning, I moved our night tables and was appalled to find a whole litter of bunnies that must have though we would never find them. I sucked them up right away, but it got me wondering where else they are hiding. Is there no end to them? I think maybe I preferred our carpets, where the dust lived far more invisibly in non-bunny state (it was still there, but I couldn't get under our furniture to see it).

So what do you do?