In visiting our fine B&B, have you noticed the drain in the kitchen floor, and that everything in the kitchen is built up off the floor? Well, this post is going to reveal the heart of this mystery: Cathedral Hill B&B’s floor washing system!
When Bill remodeled the kitchen in the 1980s, he had 5 children with more on the way, and keeping the kitchen floor clean was not easy – a mop just wasn’t cutting it, and hands and knees is so 19th century. So he decided to install a complete system that was (and still is) effective, efficient, and enjoyable.
The first step is to get everything off the floor. All of the built-ins are designed that way, so that just leaves the chairs…
and the table.
A winch comes out of the ceiling at the touch of a switch, and the table gets hooked to it using a contraption built out of a steel plate and car seatbelts, which are, of course, rated for a lot of weight. The other ends of the seatbelts are on the bottom of the table. When the winch is raised back into the ceiling…
the table goes with it and is out of the way. (You do have to be careful not to bump your head on the legs.) The decks are cleared for the warm water.
A key is required to turn the water on, thus preventing accidental flooding. Smart, Bill!
There are pipes just above the floor in different parts of the kitchen…
four in total…
giving complete coverage.
Then soap is added; squirted directly onto the floor.
There’s a long-handled brush for scrubbing,
and a long-handled squeegee to coax the water down the drain when the floor’s clean.
The final step is to wrap a large towel around the squeegee to dry the floor.
Even if the floor is swept first (which we heartily recommend!), there’s often detritus to clean off the drain as well.
Let down the table, and you’re done.
With a half-hour’s work, you’re left with a sparkling,
clean floor.
The family has a lot of good memories of this system.
One year the house was on the Ramsey Hill House tour, and the newly renovated kitchen was the prime attraction. Bill built a bridge from the kitchen door to the back door and ran the floor washing system the whole time. People were very impressed.
Over the years there’ve been a lot of kids in and out of this house, and they love to slip’n’slide across the wet kitchen floor. The adults enjoy watching them. That last happened a few months ago.
I know Anona is wearing shoes in the above pictures, but as kids, we often didn’t. Who wanted to forgo the opportunity to go wading and splashing during a Minnesota January?
Another mystery solved.
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