I received Carbona Carpet Cleaner in exchange for my honest thoughts. All opinions here are my own.
Carpets, whether you love them or hate them, most homes have at least one room with carpet. We have exactly one room in our home, and it happens to be the room we hang out in the most.
Since so much time is spent in our living room, the wear on the carpet is almost always visible – unless we cover it up with toys, which is frequent. I’ve been pretty decent at vacuuming it weekly, but let’s be honest, with 5 kids and plenty of visitors in and out – a vacuum isn’t the only thing I should be doing on a weekly basis.
From drink spills to muddy shoes, there are spot all over my carpet that make me not love it. So it’s time to spring clean it, and then put better habits into place to keep it cleaner. I brainstormed with my sister-in-law Renee, and this is what we came up with. I hope some of the advice helps you out!
Spring Clean your Carpets
When you initially decide to do a spring cleaning of the carpets, it’s going to be a deep clean. Start by
- Remove everything that doesn’t belong, and get as much off the carpet as you can. If possible, move big furniture into another room temporarily.
- Once everything is moved out that can be, give it a good vacuum. I like my Eureka! vacuum both for the price and the good job it does.
- With a surface cleaning done, it’s time to pull out the heavy duty tools. Years ago we purchased a heavy duty carpet cleaner, and it has been worth every penny. But if you don’t have one, lots of places will rent one out for a day or so at a time.
You May Also Enjoy: 5 Places You Wouldn’t Expect to be Vacuuming.
Prevention Tips to Keep Your Carpets Clean
I’ve decided we can save ourselves a lot of work in life, if we work on preventing certain things. We have well-visits with our doctor, eat healthy, and exercise all in effort to prevent ourselves from getting sick.
Similarly if we do certain things, we can prevent our carpets from needing that deep cleaning too frequently. Try implementing some of these in your home, and see what happens.
- When entering your home, take your shoes off. Ask guests to do the same. Have a nice bench to sit on, and/or to store the shoes in to make it easier and prettier. Or create a sign requesting shoes be removed before entering. This is common practice in other countries and can lead to a cleaner home for you – not just the carpets!
- Keep food and drink in the kitchen, or designated eating areas. I’m really bad at this, as the whole family enjoys snacking while watching our favorite movies together. However, it can make a world of difference when little kids aren’t wiping their pizza sauce hands all over that light colored carpet.
- Similar to food, try and keep arts and crafts to the kitchen/dining areas. Hot glue, glitter, and paint all have a tendency to get spilled at some point. They are much easier to clean off a hard floor then from your carpet.
- If you have girls who love doing nail polish, encourage them to keep it in the bathroom or on the kitchen table. Lay out a towel for their hands, and keep the bottle of polish on it as well. Nail polish is the bane of my cleaning existence.
- If you have pets, try to choose one that is hypoallergenic. Or if you only have a few areas of carpet, keep the animals out of those rooms. Also, be a responsible pet owner, and make sure you know how to potty train your pet, and get them outside for frequent bathroom breaks.
- Of course if you’re really keen on keeping your carpets impeccably clean, we suggest not having a husband or kids. However, I would choose my husband and kids over a clean carpet any day. So instead try your best to get them on board!
Spot Cleaning Your Carpet
OK, so things happen. A kids going to forget to take their shoes off, your muddy dog is going to run through the house, and you may just want to relax with that pizza in front of the TV one night.
So when the spills and messes do happen, the best way to keep your carpet clean, is to not put off cleaning up the mess. You can either take 5 minutes right then, or spend a whole day letting it build up.
Carbona’s has a great spot cleaner for the carpets that I’ve begun using. With a brush applicator attached, the only extra thing you’ll need is a wet rag to rinse the soap out after it removes the stains.
I’m not ready to spend a whole day deep cleaning my carpet, even though it needs it, so instead I’ve been going around getting the larger spots with Carbona. The solution works great, and from a quick glance, you probably won’t notice that it needs a deeper clean one of these days.The one thing I would change about Carbona is the shape of the bottle. It’s not terribly ergonomic for your hands to apply and brush, but it’s not horribly uncomfortable either.
The sooner you get to the stains with Carbona, the better it works, but as you can see with my very old (who knows when this occurred) spot, it still works. Just needs a little extra elbow grease.
It’s probably pretty obvious why you should clean your carpets. No one likes walking across dirt, and the dirty it gets, the more chance of inviting unwanted guests into your home. We have one child with a dust mite allergy, so it has been increasingly important to me for his sake to have clean floors that he can play on safely.
