8 Tips For Dealing With Dirty RV Floors
Dirty floors are a part of camping. When you’re parked in nature, the outside is almost certainly going to make its way indoors. That said, there is no reason you should spend a large chunk of your camping time sweeping the floor. If you find that you are sweeping often, you probably need to change the way you’re doing things.
The first way to ensure you have clean RV floors is to prevent dirt from making its way inside. Then you will want to find better ways to clean the floor so it will stay clean for longer. In this article, we will discuss some of the simple changes you can make to ensure your RV floors stay as clean as possible.
Preventing dirt
As mentioned above, the first step to cleaning RV floors is preventing dirt from getting inside. At times, this might feel impossible, especially when camped in an especially muddy or sandy spot, but you should still be able to cut back on the amount of dirt that enters your home-on-wheels.Â
1. Put down an outdoor rug
The first thing we recommend doing is investing in an outdoor rug. These rugs are fantastic for a lot of reasons. They give you a comfortable place to hang out outside (even without shoes on). They also make your campsite look clean and neat, and they can be used to give it some personality.
Best of all, an outdoor rug helps remove some dirt from your shoes before you enter your RV, meaning cleaner floors inside.Â
2. Use a boot brush
While the outdoor rug will remove some gunk from your shoes, it certainly won’t get all of it. For this reason, it’s also a good idea to get a boot brush and place it at the bottom of your stairs. Use this to remove all of the dirt from your shoes every single time you go inside.
3. Remove shoes before entering
Be sure to remove your shoes as soon as you get through the door! After all, even the boot brush won’t remove all of the stuff from your shoes, and removing shoes will ensure mud and muck isn’t tracked throughout the RV.
We recommend keeping a shoe bin or shoe organizer near or on the door to keep your shoes in. Some people like having house shoes nearby to switch over to when they come inside.
4. Keep pets clean
Pets can also be guilty of tracking dirt inside, and their fur can make a big mess on your RV floors. Be sure to brush your pets outside regularly so most of the fur stays outdoors, and clean their paws after every walk to ensure no mud makes its way inside. Bathing your pet often can also help.
Sweeping tips
Yes, preventing your floors from becoming too dirty is helpful, but it’s impossible to completely keep dirt from coming inside. For this reason, it is necessary to sweep your RV floors regularly. Luckily, there are some things you can do to make sweeping the floor easier and more effective.
5. Sweep daily
You might sweep multiple times a day, but the tricks above should remove the need to do that. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to stay on top of the floor cleaning by sweeping at least once a day. This will prevent build-up from happening, meaning the task will never be too difficult to handle.
6. Get in all the nooks
RVs are chock-full of nooks and crannies. Many of these areas can be difficult to reach, and because the furniture is all bolted down, moving things around to get to debris that has made its way into a nook is not possible. This makes things a little bit trickier when it comes to getting the floors clean and might require a handheld brush in some cases.
That said, it is important to get into those nooks. Why? Because the dirt left in these crevices has a tendency to work its way out, especially on travel days, leaving you with a dirty floor, even though you may have just swept. Besides, who wants to deal with crud that has built up in all those crannies over time?
7. Grab a Swiffer Wet Jet
One of the best tools you can have for keeping your RV floors clean is a Swiffer Wet Jet. No, this doesn’t take the place of a broom, and you will still need to make time for sweeping the floor. However, using the Wet Jet after you sweep is an excellent way to:
- Pick up stubborn bits of debris,
- Ensure that sticky spills are cleaned up properly, and
- Remove stuck-on gunk from your floors.
Best of all, the Wet Jet does not use as much liquid as traditional mopping, meaning you won’t accidentally damage your RV floors, and the floors will dry quickly.
8. Invest in a small vacuum cleaner
Another floor cleaning item we highly recommend having in your RV is a small vacuum cleaner. This is a given if you have carpet, but even if you don’t have any carpet in your rig, a vacuum cleaner can still be helpful.
You can use the hose of the vacuum to reach those nooks and crannies mentioned above, vacuum debris off the furniture to avoid brushing it on the floor, and even use it for tasks such as vacuuming the car or the cab of your motorhome.Â
Obviously, sweeping the floor in your RV is a task that isn’t going to go away entirely. That said, the tips above should make the job a lot less frequent and easier to do, so your camping trips will be packed with more fun and less cleaning.
Make sure you keep track of all your RV maintenance and repairs with an online tool such as RV LIFE Maintenance. Not only can you keep all of your documents in one place, but you’ll also receive timely reminders when maintenance is due to help you avoid costly repairs and potentially serious accidents.
Related articles:
