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It’s not yet spring in my neck of the woods, but the inside of our home was needing a bit of a deep clean. It was especially apparent that our carpets needed a little refresh after we took down all the holiday decor.
Life can be hard on rugs, and our light colored living room rug was looking worse for wear. Even though we are mostly a shoeless home, we LIVE in our home. And our kids and dogs are ROUGH on our carpets. Like, they spill every single thing they bring in there. (And there was a pretty nasty red wine incident on this rug while I was wrapping Christmas presents. The horrors.)
For the past few years, we have several cans of Spot Shot® Instant Carpet Stain Remover on hand and spot clean all the time. It’s very easy to hit a stain with the stain remover and then blot it away with a white rag. But sometimes, you just need a deeper, all-over clean. And the start of the year is a great time to tackle it.
Now that our rugs are squeaky clean, I can’t believe we waited so long. We picked up a carpet shampooer from a local hardware store for less than $30 and got to work. Before we started cleaning, we pulled all the furniture off the carpet and spot treated all the noticeable spots again with Spot Shot. This gave the extra dirty areas an extra boost.
The edges of the carpets had the most noticeable spots . I’ll blame the dogs and kids. Never mom and her coffee, obviously.
We have shampooed our rental carpets regularly, so we are familiar with the process. But it’s a super straightforward process of adding soap/shampoo and clean water to the shampooer and then working your way around the carpet slowly. (While you can purchase specialty shampoos, we have the very best luck with simple Dawn dish soap.) We had to refill the clean water a few times as it sucked out all the yuckiness.
Having a light rug like this in your main living space can be a challenge to keep clean with kids and dogs (and coffee and wine). We run the vacuum almost every day and spot clean when needed. Still, the amount of grime was disturbing. Here is a visible line of dirt where the shampooer ran.
Even if your carpets look clean, you’ll be disgusted at how much grime comes out of the carpet. After a few passes with the shampooer, our carpets looked noticeably better.
It was a huge improvement in less than 30 minutes.
After finishing the carpets, we let everything dry and moved all the furniture back in.
We may still have snow on the ground, but all the sunshine in the windows is good for the soul.
I moved the sofa away from the window for a little change and to let more sunlight in the living room. We still live without a coffee table to leave more space for the kids to play. 
And in case you are wondering, I managed to spill an entire cup of coffee and a glass of chocolate milk within 48 hours of cleaning the carpet. Nothing is too precious around here. 
Luckily – we still have a dozen cans of Spot Shot® Instant Carpet Stain Remover on hand. (I keep a few on every floor of our home for easy access.)
For big spills, I find it best to soak up as much of the liquid/stain as possible right away with rags. THEN, use the Spot Shot Instant Carpet Stain Remover to saturate the carpets. After a few minutes, I blot the stain away with a light towel. If there’s still a stain, I give it another go.
You can get Spot Shot at Walmart or find your local store here.
Yeah, I recommend this product too. Before we have a mold problem, and then use a carpet, but it always get stained due to a lot of traffic. Then we found Spot Shot.