Floor mop diapers

Many, many years ago I used a product called Mop n Glo which was a floor cleaner and polish together. (Do they still make it?) It cleaned the floor and left a great shine. I stopped using it when I had to throw away far too many mops. I would forget to clean the mop after cleaning the floor. The mop would dry and get very stiff. Too stiff to use again.

I went back to using a regular floor cleaning solution with a mop that I had to wring out by hand. Then along came the Libman wonder mop. Fantastic! No longer did I have to put my hands into dirty floor mop water. Not only that, but I could throw the mops into the washer to clean them. The trouble with this new mop was that I would leave the mop in the water too long. The mop handles would rust and break right where it attaches together.



Well all righty; now I have a new favorite mop. I don't have to carry around a bucket of water anymore. These new mops have been around for awhile. Until now, I never wanted to buy one. Why?

Well because the brands I saw required me to purchase new pads and new solution to use each time I mopped. I have a lot of floor to mop. I guessed it would take a minimum of 10 pads to mop all my floors really clean each time. In my opinion that's not very frugal. It also puts lots more waste in a landfill. I believe I contribute enough to landfill already so I didn't want to start using something to put much more there.

This brand has all the advantages I wanted to see before buying one. Yippie!

The bottle is refillable. Unlike other brands that requires a new bottle of solution or more ready to use pads each time a person mops floors. I can put whatever solution of bleach or homemade floor cleaner or special laminate floor cleaner I want into the bottle. I won't be putting lots of empty plastic bottles into a landfill either.

For this project to work as I hoped, I needed something that's reusable. Constantly buying new pads to clean the floor is not an option. I bought these wow cloths at the Dollar Tree store. They are supposed to be super absorbent.

Then I searched through my quilting stash to find this velcro. Not an easy task when I've been boxing up stuff so it's easily moved by the floor installation guys. I want to use velcro because I don't like the push in system these mops use for holding the cloths.

The starter kit includes this package of pads. This will be my pattern.

I measure to find the pad is 9" x 11".

I measure and cut some pieces from the wow cloth. Then mark the cut outs. I don't see a purpose for the cut out section but decided to follow it anyway.

I cut some two inch pieces of matching velcro.

Measure and put a tick mark on each side to line up the velcro pieces. I put mine about 1 1/2" from the edge.

Sew on the velcro pieces. Remember to sew one side up and one side down or you'll have to frog stitch them. I kept repeating.... sticky side up, fuzzy side down. I used velcro because I had it. If you don't have velcro you could use elastic, tabs with buttons and button holes, strings to tie, or something else. You just want something that will keep the pad on while mopping.

All done! Now these can be used and washed. I wash my rugs each time I mop the floors. I can put the dirty mop diapers in with the rugs. Eventually these will wear out and need to be replaced but it's far better than throwing bunches of them into a landfill each week.

Why do I call them floor mop diapers? Well, have a look. Doesn't that look like a diaper to you? Not only that but they are meant to soak up lots of liquid and junk just like a diaper does.

After going through making these; it occurred to me that I needn't have bought the new mop if I didn't want to spend the money. I could have used my swiffer and used an empty dish detergent bottle for the solution. Duh!


Oh well. Learn as I go. Now I have two options whenever I mop floors. I have to wait until the new floor is installed to test these out. Hmm.... while I've been type talking this post it occurred to me that another use for scrap batting is to make some floor mop pads. Layer scrap fabric (or old wash cloths?) and scrap batting, sew it together, hmm... it should work. Ok, that's a project for another day.