Awesomesauce

***Disclaimer***This should go without saying but I am obviously far too lame to ever get popular enough in the blogosphere to be paid for my opinion! We simply ordered a product and are thrilled with its performance so I am passing along info to anyone who stumbles across it.
I told you a while back about taking the infomercial plunge and ordering a Shark Navigator vacuum that came with a free Shark Steam Mop. Well, it took about 2 weeks, but they are here!!! And they are AWESOME!!!!!
The vacuum came on Monday and we had vacuumed with our old Bissel on Sunday evening. Now with three kids and a dog having 24 hours on it, I did not expect it to be clean still, but they amount of stuff the Shark got up was incredible! Biggest love is that it's so quiet you can still talk with it running.
A weird thing our extremely lovable dog does is leave "tokens" for us on the carpet. Let me be clear here; by "tokens" I mean he takes his first mouthful of dog food and carries it to the living room and places it on the floor for us. We are his pack leaders, you see. He also does this when we return home from somewhere he didn't get to go. It is a gesture of doggie love and we have not tried to train him out of it. With our old Bissel vacuum, instead of the vacuum picking up the squares of kibble, it pushed them along in front of it. To actually pick it up with the vacuum you had to kind of flop the vacuum head on top of the kibble piece. Shark vacuum picks it right up off the carpet!
Another problem with the Bissel was when we vacuumed the bare floor of our kitchen/dining area, most of the stuff would spin back off the brush heads and hit us in the feet (which is actually kind of painful). So for years we haven't even tried to vacuum in there, we just sweep. But the floor never felt very clean afterwards. You could still find some grit with your bare feet. Shark, eats up every piece of dirt and hair from the linoleum floor. Crumbs? Gone. Chunks of dog food? Not so much...if you run over them backwards they got sucked up though. Still a vast improvement. And the floor FEELS clean when you walk on it afterwards.
The Shark is not a light vacuum. It weighs about 16 pounds according to their website. you would expect it to be hard to maneuver but it isn't. Turn of the wrist makes it turn, and on the carpet it almost feels self-propelled due to the power of its suction.
And the Steam Mop?! Glorious! You fill the reservoir with clean water, no chemicals, no soaps. It heats up within a minute and the one reservoir of water was enough steam to clean our entire kitchen and dining area. It has washable cloth heads that velcro into place and we had no trouble with slippage. It comes with two heads and you can order more (we did) in sets of three from the website. They also sell them at stores like Target or anywhere else that sells the mop. With the steam, the floor is dry in another couple minutes and you are done mopping! No rinsing, no residue, no pine scent or lemon scent or any other scent besides the Febreze Noticeables, I actually WANT to smell in there. I am a happy girl :)
As I said, we ordered these from the product website. We paid $199 for the vacuum and got the mop for free. I came across some coupon codes. "25 off" for orders under $200 and "75 off" for orders over $200. Our order total was $199.80!! So I ordered the extra mop heads for $20 and used the $74 coupon code. The shipping is high (around $50) but all told for around $350 worth of merchandise we paid $201. not too shabby.