taking shoes off

Wouldn't bother me, I would always offer to remove them anyway, and carry a little pair of slipper socks for cold floors. Wish our callers did the same especially in the Winter!
I am too much of a coward to ask them I am afraid. ?

Apparently, Melania Trump "makes guests to the Trump triplex cover their shoes to protect the marble floors".

Dead fashionable then to ask people to de-shoe.

I'll just carry on tramping into our hard-floored kitchen in my wellies and hiking boots then. Not all the time, you understand, just to grab something for an outside eat and drink, or some matches to start a fire. Never did follow fashion. Fancy having floors that have to be protected. People are so weird, especially rich peeps like the Trumps who could afford floors that didn't need protection.

But that would defeat the purpose of everything looking shiny new and unused and houses looking as if no-one ever did anything interesting in them, houses full of boring people who only did anything for show but had no personality, or only oersonality they were ashamed of.

A pox on shiny houses, I say. Live life like you love it, dust and all.

thatbags

In my home we sit and lie on our deep pile clean silver grey carpets. I would consider it the height of bad manners for a guest to insist on wearing their outdoor shoes inside. Those who feel the need to wear shoes are welcome to bring their own slippers or use our spare ones kept for that purpose.
Can I ask those who have people traipsing over their carpets in outdoor shoes just how often they deep clean those carpets?
I frequently walk in from the garden to the kitchen in muddy boots but that is a tiled surface which gets mopped afterwards.

You can tramp all you like downstairs in my house in your dirty boots bags - except in the sitting room or dining room please where I have a new carpet? But give it a year or two of shoes, DC/DGC spillages etc you'll be OK

No marble floors here but in fact you can feel the toasty warm floor in the conservatory is you take your shoes off

Why would I regularly deep-clean my carpets? We have chairs and sofas to sit/lie on - carpets are for walking on, with or without shoes!

(If I were to lie down on the floor a) it would be uncomfortable and b) it could take me some time to get up again...

I think there is a difference between 'clean dirt' ie garden dirt, and street dirt.

If you lie on the floor you always tend to notice that the skirting boards need dusting.

So unless you want an extra job, don't get down there.

If you are walking on Trump's marble floors in your socks and you slip can you sue him for a small fortune?

I think I'd rather not go there in the first place

I would be like Hyacinth Bucket's neighbour, spilling the tea.

Oh dear! tea on the marble floor not a good situation.

I remember picking up DS1 from a friend's house many years ago and being amazed that he had to find his shoes near the front door to come with me.

When I asked why he took his shoes off at his friend's house and not mine, he responded , "Because his house is cleaner than ours. Hmmm....I wonder how that could be!!

Thatbags, I agree 100%.

As for marble floors, unless you live in an always-hot country then I don't care how expensive they are, I think they're awful, so cold and hard. I did live in a flat with marble floors in Cyprus once - OK in the summer, but bloody freezing in winter - and Cyprus can get very cold.
A neighbour of ours has them - installed by a previous owner - IMO so utterly unsuitable for this climate, where wood or carpet are so much more warm and friendly.

One solution is a pair of lightweight ballet pump type shoes/slippers, you can even get them so they roll up in your handbag. I keep a pair of espadrille type shoes (?) to wear as slippers at DD's house or st least I did until last summer when we were in a hurry to get me to the station and I realised on the platform that I had come out in them
I don't like slippers as such, but a pair of lightweight indoor shoes makes sense and is safer than slipping on wooden or tiled floors.

The blue lightweight plastic overshoes can be useful to slip on when you have done your shoe laces up and suddenly remember something essential you need to retrieve from indoors.

But it is perfectly possible to forget that you have put them on.

When I was 12 years old I stepped (unknowingly) on a sewing needle on my bedroom floor. GP diagnosed a broken bone and strapped a wide bandage round my foot. Three weeks later the bandage came off and I was still in pain. An X-ray surprisingly showed the needle working its way up through the ball of my foot (near my 2 smallest toes) and I needed a general anaesthetic and an overnight hospital stay to remove the needle. Since then I always have something on my feet even if shabby old slippers and I am not happy going barefoot anywhere.
I have one set of friends who ask for outdoor shoes to be removed and I do my best to take my slippers with me. In my house - life is too short to worry.

I have never been asked by anyone I have visited to take my shoes off. Floors and carpets are for walking on. Unless your front door opens directly from street into a living room there is space for a door mat. My hallway is wood flooring. I have a fitted carpet in the front room and a rug on wooden flooring in the back room. Kitchen diner has wooden floor too. I wear slippers in the house in winter for warmth but in summer either barefoot or flip flops around the house. I have not, nor have the DGC who sprawl about on the floor a lot, suffered from bottom of shoe related illness or infection.

Esspee I shampoo my carpet about twice a year.
I spend a lot of time crawling around in the mud when working in my garden I cannot comfortably bend down. I do change shoews and trousers then.
I have never caught anything from the carpet or the mud in the garden in last 60 odd years. I would prefer to people take off outdoor shoes because I CBA to have to clean the carpet so often.

My house is carpeted, I don't like cold floors at all. I look at my DDs laminate floors and think it would be so much more comfortable for the little ones to play on a soft warm surface.
As it is my indoor shoes always seem to fall off about the house. I am a cold footed shoe shedder wherever I go.

Sorry I posted too soon again.

Notanan I am a fan of "peck of dirt" mentality and a confirmed Dettol hater.

Well I hate Dettol's continued campaign to terrify us all into spraying anti bacterial sprays on every surface and our bodies and washing powders in the process they are probably creating a lot more new bugs which will be immune to the good old stand by soap and hot water. (Some people clearly do need extra support to avoid bacteria.)

Dettol's claims are just done to boost the sales of Reckitt who were once just known for lumps of "washing blue".

My proof reading is getting even worse.

I take off my shoes as a matter of course as I enter my own or anyone else's house and I expect visitors to do the same.
I'm not over fussy about cleanliness (never bought Dettol in my life) but nobody's walking over my floors with shoes they've stepped in dog poo or blobs of phlegm.

So do you actually tell people (such as meter readers, emergency services staff, elderly and disabled neighbourse etc.) to take their shoes off or they can't come in?

I'm amazed at how inhospitable some people seem to be!

I'm with bags on this one.

I always slip mine off and would not think my host inhospitable for wanting this. Some people are more houseproud than others. That's ok.
I don't ask visitors to take off shoes but some insist on doing so anyway. I have a long runner in the hall and that gets cleaned or replaced as necessary.