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Southwest Floor Coverings
Last updated on Thursday, July 17, 2003
One of the keys to successful living in the New Mexico Southwest is brown floors. If you've just moved here you'll soon discover "Earth, Wind, and Fire" . . . Whoops, that's the name of a Seventies rock group. What you'll discover is dust, strong breezes, and lots of sunshine.
Sunshine keeps the moisture out of the ground leaving it dry and mobile. The mobility factor is what makes it dust. Wind, of course, is what moves the dust around.
Unless you happen to be a multi-gadzillionaire, and most of us aren't Ted Turner, you don't have enough money to seal your home against the invasive intrusion of dust particles. Even if you could, you'd still have to leave the door open or die when the oxygen ran out, kind of defeating the purpose.
To keep a home appearing neat and cared for there are two basic choices: You can dust about four times a day and vacuum at least twice, or, you can make it "look" like you've been busy with cleaning equipment. As a matter of personal preference, I prefer the latter option. This is where the brown floors come in.
In the living room a brown carpet or rug with really deep pile is the ticket to a nearly maintenance-free lifestyle. The deeper the pile the less vacuum operation time you'll need. If you can find carpeting with pile two and a half to three inches deep you may be able to last five or six months before it becomes necessary to perform vacuuming chores.
A few words of caution, however. When the carpet is installed you might find it advisable to lay down a coating of ant poison. This should be renewed after you've finally gotten around to using the vacuum. Also, when you get beyond the first month or two after installation or cleaning, you should avoid spilling liquids, such as beer, on your carpeting. A muddy living room is not necessarily the safest of environments.
The dining room and kitchen, while still requiring a brown floor, present different problems. Tile is the preferred floor covering, but linoleum is certainly satisfactory. You'll still have dust, of course, but the thing that causes most of the build up in these rooms is food deposits. Almost all food, as I'm sure you know, will turn brown after it lays there awhile. The key is to select a shade of brown for your floor that will match your most prevalent spills. This depends on your diet. You may have to experiment a bit to find a good all around match. For example, the remains of a liverwurst, jalapeno, and onion sandwich will turn a different hue than, say, the remains of a rutabaga and emu gizzard stew.
There are shortcuts to keeping the kitchen and dining areas appearing neat and clean. One of the easiest is to go out and buy a dog. This "companion" will take care of most food spills instantly. For extra cleanliness, get two dogs.
The scheduling of cleaning chores may be a problem for some, but here, as nearly everywhere else, there are shortcuts. I don't mark the calendar or post reminder notes to the refrigerator door; I've found that it's a lot easier to simply break out the cleaning equipment when I start tracking material "out" of the house.
I was going to conclude this article by providing information on floor choices for the bathroom, but was told by the editor, "Don't go there." Editors are very wise.
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