If you’re one of the many around the world who has to work from home courtesy of shelter in place or quarantine restrictions with the current pandemic, you’re certainly not alone. Who would have thought that WFH would become such a widely recognised abbreviation? When you work from home and have to work out how to keep the kids quiet when you’re in a Zoom meeting and all the new challenges of the new system, there are also a few upsides. You can work in your pyjamas (as long as your top half looks neat for the camera) or on the couch, and nobody cares if you have a very, very fragrant curry for lunch, as long as you share.
However, they will care if you spill the curry. And so they should. Carpet stains aren’t a joke, and they aren’t something you can be slack about, even if you can get away with being slack about doing your hair in quarantine. If you don’t do something about that stain, it will permanently set in the carpet and be there long after this pandemic is nothing but a memory.
In normal circumstances, if you get something on your carpet, you’d be able to send for a professional carpet cleaner to deal with it if you either didn’t have the time to tackle it or if you didn’t know how to do it. That’s why many carpet cleaning companies offer emergency stain removal services. However, during the restrictions, carpet cleaners may not be able to come to you because of the social distancing rules (if you’re not sure, contact the carpet cleaners in your area and ask them). This means that you may have to do something about that stain yourself – or at least get rid of the worst of it and then know what NOT to do so when all the craziness is over, it will be more straightforward for a professional to remove.
How Not To Treat A Stain
If you’ve spilt something messy and sticky on the carpet or the upholstery, two techniques are usually your friends in the world of cleaning… but not for removing stains from carpets. These are hot water and a vacuum cleaner. Leave these to one side for the most part when dealing with stains. But why?
Let’s look at the vacuum cleaner first. It might be tempting and seem super simple to vacuum up the mess off the carpet, even if it is something wet and sloppy. This is a terrible idea. If your vacuum cleaner is the sort that has a paper dust bag inside it, anything wet will make the bag disintegrate, and whatever’s in it will go everywhere and will probably damage the workings of your machine. Even in the case of a bagless vacuum, you still end up with the problem of the wet stuff getting all over the inside of the head, the hose and the dust compartment. This would be bad enough if what you were slurping up was just water because water would trap dust and the like and leave you with build-up on the inside, which could lead to blockages (kind of like plaque inside the arteries of someone who’s had a lifetime of smoking, fast muck food and no exercise). However, what’s on your carpet probably isn’t just water but stickier and more substantial. This will get into your vacuum cleaner, and you will probably never get it out, meaning that you’ll get the smell of whatever it was every time you turned the vacuum cleaner on. If what you were trying to remove from the carpet was something noxious like pet pee or vomit, do you really want your house to smell like that every time you vacuum? Put that vacuum back in the cupboard for now.
What about hot water? While hot water usually has extra cleaning power (which is why professional carpet and rug cleaners always offer steam cleaning services), it can be a problem with certain stains. Any stain involving protein – the most common are blood and egg yolk – will set into the carpet fibres if cooked in. On top of that, if your carpets are made from wool, a combination of heat and acid is just what’s needed for dyeing the wool, as a keen crafter could tell you. This isn’t what you want if you’ve spilt soft drink or food colouring on the carpets – in these circumstances, heat is your enemy. Stick to cold water only and don’t use hair dryers or irons until the end of the job, and even then, only use heat if you’re 100% certain that the stain doesn’t involve protein or acid.
Steps For Treating A Stain The Right Way
For any stain, no matter what it is, these are the basic steps that you need to follow:
- Scrape, scoop or blot up as much of the stain as you can.
- Lightly dampen the area so that (a) the stain stays soft rather than drying in place, (b) the carpet fibres will absorb the water in preference to the stain and (c) the water will loosen some of the gunk so that you can remove it more easily. USE COLD WATER.
- Blot up the water with a paper towel or cloth towel. This will often remove some of the stains.
- Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until you’ve got out as much of the stain as possible.
In many cases, this procedure will get out quite a lot of stains, although it will take a fair bit of patience and time. Some common stains like beetroot juice, blood, children’s paints, soft drink and even red wine will come out from the carpet this way, as long as you get onto the stain as soon as you can.
Other stains may need a bit of extra treatment. Here are a few things that you can try at home that will help:
- For greasy stains (fat, oil, crayons, etc.), add a little soap to the mix and scrub very gently. You can use warm water to activate the soap, but this should be as hot as the inside of your elbow.
- For permanent marker, use some methylated spirits, hair spray or vodka (or similar strong spirits) to dissolve the ink before blotting it up.
- To get candle wax off the carpet, cover the carpet with a thick wad of loo paper or about three paper towels, then use an iron on the lowest setting on the spot. The heat will melt the wax, and the paper towel will absorb it. Then treat the spot as you would for greasy stains.
- For bubble gum or Blu-tack, apply ice to the spot to freeze the wretched stuff solid so you can pick it off a bit more easily. Then treat like you would for greasy stains.
- For nail polish, if the carpet or rug is made from natural materials, use a little nail polish remover and take it off like you would from your nails. Nail polish remover doesn’t play very nicely with carpets made from synthetic materials, so if you don’t know what your carpet or rug is made of, then don’t try this, or you may wreck the carpet.
- For anything really smelly, after you’ve removed it, sprinkle baking soda on the spot to absorb the smell. Leave it there for about 15 minutes. Then sweep up the baking soda; don’t vacuum it.
- In the case of something really revolting and organic that’s likely to leave nasty bacteria (pee, poop and vomit), add a little disinfectant to the cold water to sanitise the area.
As you can see, a stain on your carpet is not the end of the world (well, your fine fibre loving world, in particular). You have a few options to neutralise the damage and help with the first help of your soft furnishing. However, if you want to be 100% on the safe side, you need to call in the carpet cleaning cavalry.
Bette be safe than sorry.