Best Homemade Floor Cleaner Recipes For Tile, Hardwood, & Laminate

By opting to go the DIY route (er, grout in this instance?), you can tailor your cleaner to suit your flooring type and personal scent preferences. Here are our suggestions for making the best DIY floor cleaner recipes for laminate (also vinyl), hardwood and stone depending on what flooring type you have:

Coated Tile & Laminate: Both with vinegar- and vinegar-free recipes are suitable as DIY laminate floor cleaner. Avoid excess water to prevent warping or mold growth under laminate. See recipes 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Sealed Hardwood: Use a slightly damp mop with either recipe. Excessive water or vinegar can damage the finish over time. See recipes 3 and 4 for DIY hardwood floor cleaner.

Natural Stone: Stick to the vinegar-free recipe. Acidic cleaners like vinegar can erode stone surfaces like marble, granite, or travertine. See recipe 2.

Our recipes below say that you should put the solutions in a bucket so that you can submerge your mophead. However, if you use a Swiffer mop with a spray function, you can just fill the reservoir with the same solution, and can even halve them if it’s too much.

If you use a Swiffer mop with a reusable mop pad as we do, you can either dunk it in the bucket as you would a normal mop, or place the solution in a sprayer bottle and simply dampen the pad while mopping as needed. We recommend the latter in this instance as you’ll need to use less of the solution and it’ll last for a whole lot longer.

The first three recipes make large buckets, but the recipes can easily be halved or quartered to best suit your floor space and how much mopping you actually need to do.