While taking your shoes off indoors is considered polite in many cultures, many of you may be wondering if it’s really bad to keep your shoes indoors. This is why we thought it would be useful to put together a brief article on this subject to help our Gainesville area homeowners. If this is something that you’ve always wanted to learn more about, read on as we break down everything you need to know about wearing shoes indoors.
What Are the Benefits of Taking Off Your Shoes Indoors?
Never walk around indoors with your shoes on. This isn’t just something our mothers told us, this rule is actually based on three key benefits: your home will be cleaner, your carpet will last longer, and you will live a healthier life.
Dirt, grime and even microscopic contaminants can get plastered all over the bottom of your shoes and are brought into your house every day. By leaving your shoes at the door, you’ll be able to focus your cleaning energies on specific “hot spots,” rather than tackling the entire house. You won’t spread disease-causing bacteria around the house either. Bacteria can latch onto the straps and treads of your shoes when you walk in places that are infested with bacteria and germs – especially public restrooms, where more than half of all public floor mats are covered in fecal matter.
Do Shoes Damage Carpets?
Do not wear your shoes inside the house, especially if your floors are carpeted. This is because shoes can bring in dirt, toxins, and many forms of harmful bacteria into your home. Because your carpets will act exactly the same as any doormat, these contaminants can become trapped within your carpet and build up over a short amount of time, leading to stains, discoloration, and other problems. If your carpet is not treated properly, the pollutants trapped in your carpet will keep building and become a health hazard. It takes only a small amount of time for this to happen.
Along with the pollutants on your shoes, the overall quality of your carpet will continue to deteriorate with excess dirt and grit grinding on them all the time. Your carpet becomes dirtier and worse each time you track dirt and grime in with your shoes. This means that you’ll have to vacuum more regularly or even get the carpet cleaned more often than usual.
Should You Go Barefoot?
Although it may seem like shoes are not the best for carpets, you may be surprised to learn that going barefoot on carpeted floors can also cause harm to your carpet. Sweat, body oil, and moisture will build up within the fibers of your carpet, making the flooring coated with this biofilm and causing a bad odor. Instead of wearing shoes, you may be better off using socks or clean slippers in order to keep your carpet cleaner for longer periods of time.
Conclusion
We hope this article proves to be useful when it comes to helping you gain a better understanding of how wearing shoes indoors is not a good practice. As you can see, it’s generally a bad idea to wear shoes indoors as they can bring a lot more dirt and contaminants into your home. If you’ve been wearing shoes indoors, it would be best to reach out to professional carpet cleaners so that you can improve the cleanliness of your space.
Keep your carpets clean with the help of Dreyer’s Carpet Care. We are a family-owned,multi-generational carpet cleaning company in Gainesville that can handle everything from carpet-related emergencies to regularly scheduled maintenance. Our IICRC-certified professionals can clean, protect and help restore every type of flooring in your home or office. Get a quote now!
