Rug Cleaning Adventures

Hi all! I know I haven't blogged in a couple of weeks, but today it's Saturday and I'm home watching Netflix, so thought I would share a recent adventure we had involving rug cleaning. I know, it sounds super exciting. But it actually was a pretty exciting day in our household.

First off, our living room rug has seen better days. I bought it back in 2013 (remember this post?), and Saleen likes to rub and lick on it because of her allergies. In short, it's gotten pretty disgusting for that reason. Yep, having a dog has made us learn "we can't have nice things." I'll spare you the "before cleaning" pictures.

We had gone a while without cleaning the rug, so we decided to rent a Rug Doctor at our local Dollar General. You can rent it for $30, along with buying the solution that goes in it for about $5.

We gave it a good vacuum first. Then Trent filled it with a mix of water and the solution, and I held the edges of the rug in place while he ran the Rug Doctor over it.

While you run it over the rug, it releases the mixture of solution and water, and also has brushes underneath that vibrate while it runs.

We had to continuously refill it with more solution, since it goes through it pretty quickly. And we ran it over the rug row by row, several times to make sure we got the dirt out the best we could.

Once we were done, instead of letting it dry in the living room, we took the rug and the rug pad underneath, outside and hung them on the fence for a little over a day to fully dry out.

We didn't want it to hold onto any water between the rug and the rug pad, since that might leave a little "mustiness" in the air, and no one wants that.. Eww!

I think leaving it out in the sun probably helped bleach the stains a little bit, too. At least we like to think so. So here's the "after":

It's not perfect, but it looks visibly cleaner, for sure! I'd say renting the Rug Doctor was worth it, not to do all the time, but I'd maybe do it once a year or so.

At first I was really hesitant to let Saleen into the living room again, and wiped off every stain she left. Haha. But now I've come to the conclusion that it's inevitable that the rug WILL get dirty again.

So, moral of the story, having a nice rug + a dog with allergies, do not mix! But a good rug cleaning every now and then makes things a little nicer, at least for the time being.