Hi! I am Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. If you have a pet or children or construction workers in your house, inevitably you're going to get some stains on your carpet.
Unfortunately, we have an old dog here, and I have noticed certain nipping at the grass tips in the yard the other day and I should have known and she had an upset stomach, and sure enough she got sick on the carpet. Fortunately for me, I was able to witness it. I saw it happened, I immediately got her outside and I flew up there to get all the supplies I needed.
What I did initially was grab some rubber gloves, and some paper towels, and I picked it all up right away. Then taking some of my favorite stain spot cleaner, I hit the carpet and blotted it to the center just like they say to do, and then I scrubbed it a little bit more, and then I rinsed it little bit, dried it and I was real happy thinking that well, I got on this right away, I am not going to have an issue with my carpet. You can imagine my disappointment the next morning when I thought I had this all taken care of, when I saw this yellow urine looking stain, still in the carpet that was about four inches round. I found a unique way to take care of that.
The household supplies that you have for this cleaning, this spot cleaning job, are pretty basic. A hair dryer, a little measuring cup or a cup of hot water, a teaspoon for dispensing the dish-washing liquid, a steam iron which people have, a bucket for keeping to clean water in, and plenty of cotton rags, clean cotton rags because these are probably the most critical part of this whole clean-up process. And also a Shop-Vac, a wet dry vac that you can suck up moisture with.
Using a cup of hot water, go ahead and take some dish-washing liquid of your choice, as long as it's a grease fighting dish-washing liquid or you add a teaspoon of dish-washing liquid to just dump it right in that hot water, give a little bit of a stir.
For this four inch round spot we have here, I am going to probably use about half of this. And I'm going to take it and I know this looks a little crazy, but I am going to dump it pretty liberally on that four-inch spot. I will probably use maybe a little bit more than a half.
Using about five layers of cotton rags that are bigger than the spot and also bigger than my iron, I take my bucket of clean hot water; there are no cleaning supplies in this and I am going to thoroughly soak these rags. We'll go ahead and give them a squeeze, not rinsing all the water out of it, but a little bit. I'm going to flatten them back out again, and I am going to lay down right there over top of that wet spot.
Having my iron set on medium heat and low steam, now on top of these five wet rags that you can fill they are pretty moist here, I'm going to place the iron directly over top of the stain. As you can hear, it starts to sizzle, as it starts sizzling these rags and creating stream with these rags. Now I'm not going to let it sit on one spot, I'm going to move it around a little bit because I want that iron to force steam into this carpet and into that spot with the idea that we are going to draw that spot out of this carpet.
Now the reason I don't want to let it sit too long in one place is I don't want to dry these rags out and take a chance on burning this carpet. So of course, I can see the top of the rags. Now what you want to do, is you want to move the heat around to draw the spot up, but not keep it in one place so long that you are going to release the adhesive on the back of the carpet.
As you can see this is not my towel scorching. This is actually the stain being drawn up through these five layers of cotton towels we have here. And as you can pull it up and turned it over, you can see that it's pulling that stain up into these rags. This is exactly what you want to see happen. Now I am going to rinse these rags out in that clean water again, and we're going to reapply the heat.
Now I'm shooting this in real time, just to show that I am not really leaving this iron on there very long. You can see how hot, how quickly it gets hot. But again, you can even with a second application after I rinse these rags; you can actually see where the spot has started to come up again. There it is.
Now that I've steam this a couple of times, it's looking pretty good to me. I am not sure, if this is going to draw anymore up. What I am going to do is, I rinse this bucket out, put some clean cool water in it. I'm going to go ahead and soak one of my rags up, just a single rag. I am going to put it -- I am not going to rinse it real well, I am going to let it be a little bit wet, and I'm going to set it back on that spot again. I'm going to press on it, to press a little bit of moisture back into the fabric.
Then what I am going to do, is I am going to blot this area up until I am sure with dry rags, until I am sure that I have all the dish-washing liquid soaked up and I don't see any more stain residue coming up. It's a clean dry rag; this isn't anything that I have used already, and I'm going to go ahead, and sit it up on here, making sure I put as much pressure in there as possible to soak up any of that stain or anything else, or any that dish-washing liquid that could still be in there.
You notice I am not scrubbing it back and forth because what I wanted to do is bring it up into the towel. If you are doing this a few times with some clean towels and doing it every time, I am not seeing any more stain coming up or I am seeing is a little bit of residue liquid coming up, we're Pretty much done except for one more phase.
Now that I'm confident that the stain is up, the carpet still feels a little bit damp. I don't like leaving damp carpet. I want to dry this as much as I possibly can. So I brought up my wet dry vac and I put my attachment on it that can - to try to make the suction as much as possible. Even though this isn't sucking water and the thing is still pretty damp, we'll go ahead and we'll kick on the Shop-Vac and we'll go ahead and suck it up as much as possible.
If you have company coming over soon and you don't want this damp spot to be in the floor, you can always take a blow dryer, putting it on medium heat, and high blow. Now again you don't want to add, you don't want to get crazy and stick this down on the carpet, you'll scorch the carpet and you'll melt the plastic that's underneath the carpet here that will release this carpet. You don't want that to happen, so you have got be careful.
Using another clean dry towel, go ahead and turn it on the blow and rubbing under the back of your hand will feel the heat. So you'll know if you're overdoing it, and I go ahead dry it off like that. It's been 24 hours and here is our same four inch spot. Looking at the surrounding area of the carpet, the stain is completely come out and I'm very happy with the results.
This is the method that we've used on all different types of carpet and all different types of stains and we have had really good luck like getting out the vast majority of them without any problem right down to Red Collie. So I am just telling you that this is something you might want to give a shot, instead of having to run up to the stores to get those little spot cleaners which we've tried in past and haven't had very much luck.
I am Bob - oh, one more thing just to want you to know, a lot of times when people are doing cleaning and things like that, they have a tendency to say more is better and in this case that's not the case. If you overdo that heat like I am showing you to do and you don't use good measure, you can damage your carpet or scorch your carpet. So you have to keep things wet while you are doing it with the iron, and you have to use it in good measure, just do it a little lot of time, you can repeat it two or three times if necessary until it sucks up.
You don't just want to set that iron on there and just let it go. Now that's not really the good idea and that's not the way I have showed you to do it.
I am Bob Schmidt with Home Remodel Workshop. If you're not interested in this tip, please check out our home channel, we have many other videos at Home.
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