Ok, that’s obviously an exaggeration, but Orange Glo has definitely ruined my love of our hardwood floors in our living room, it ruined my Sunday, and will more than likely ruin today and tomorrow too.
Let’s go back to the very beginning: The first time I (and by I, I mean Scott) “cleaned” our floors with this product I thought this stuff was magical. The shine!! The color of the wood seemed somehow richer and deeper! And did I mention the shine?! I was hooked on the shininess! I could literally see my reflection. It was amazing. So we used Orange-Glo again and again and again over the course of 2 years.
But over time I started to notice we had lots of scratches on our beautiful wood floors. I came to the conclusion that the scratches must be from Casey running around like a deranged cat and I just needed to make sure I trimmed his claws more often in order to prevent more scratches. But then I started to notice how the cat hair (and there’s always a lot of cat hair) seemed to be stuck to the floor in certain places and it would not come off. It was as if it was lacquered onto the wood. I just concluded that we had to be more careful with swiffering the floors first before mopping it with Orange-Glo and I needed to brush Casey’s fur more often to prevent the fur from getting all over our pretty, shiny floors in the first place. Notice how the cat is getting a lot of the blame so far?
The kicker was when I decided to throw a New Year’s Eve party at our house. I started to do what every party hostess does; I started to overanalyze the cleanliness of my house, worried that my guests will think I live in filth. During this flurry of cleaning and organizing, the hardwood floors really started to bother me. I tried scrubbing the cat hair stuck to the floor with some water and paper towels with no success. I was too afraid to use anything else for fear of ruining the wood floors, so I googled “Orange Glo hair stuck to floor” to see if anyone else was experiencing my problem and if they had a safe solution for hair removal. I found pages and pages of people bitching about Orange Glo.
It turns out that the scratches I am seeing are not scratches in the wood, it’s scratches in the layer of residue Orange Glo leaves behind. That same residue also traps any stray particles of dust, dirt, or hair and cements it to your floors. The only solution for removing the scratched up residue and all the junk stuck to it? Mix one gallon of water with one cup of ammonia and scrub your floors by hand in order to get that crap off – taken straight from the horse’s mouth, Orange Glo. When I read that, my initial reaction was “Just f'ing shoot me”.
So yesterday Scott and I started Project Orange-Glo Removal. We got our bucket, mixed our ammonia and water solution, got a mop, some dishwashing scrubbing sponges, and some old towels and went to work on our floors. Dread quickly turned into anger. I was pissed. This shit is hard to scrub off! You really have to put some elbow grease in it to remove 2 years worth of Orange Glo. I began to get delirious and started to make up songs to pass the time. Classic tunes such as this (sung to the tune of 'You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch'): “You’re a foul one, Orange Glo, You’re made of nasty wasty junk, you smell of unwashed socks, your bottle is full of gunk; Orange Glo, the three words that best describe you are as follows and I quote: Piece, Of, Shit!”
We may have won the battle last night, but the floors are winning the war. We only got half way done before we had to stop due to bodily pain and injuries. Round two is tonight, and more than likely round three will be tomorrow.
So if you’re ever over at my house, please compliment how beautiful my wood floors are once I am done with this horrid task of cleaning them. It will make me feel better about the fact that I can no longer stand up completely straight and I have bruises running down my legs which look rather permanent. Seriously, just f'ing shoot me.
