Can I use shag to describe my newly cleaned carpets even though I do not in fact have shag carpet? I think so. Moving on. Cleaning my carpets is something I put on my to-do list for this month and in reality it has been on my wish list for a LONG time. I put it on an official to-do list because I’ve waited long enough and school is starting very soon. I don’t own a carpet cleaner so I had to borrow one from a family member. This is one of the reasons I had to wait so long.
I cleaned my carpets on a few different days. The first day I did my entryway/stairs, kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. The second day I did the second bedroom, and the last day I did the living room and master bedroom. These days totally were not consecutive. Whoops.
Even though the lighting is different in these photos you can still see how much smaller and less noticeable the stain is. This was probably the dirtiest area in our whole house. Below is a view of the dining room from the living room. I might do this area again in the future because the nastiness isn’t completely gone 🙁
When I first started cleaning the carpets I didn’t really see a huge difference in most of the spots. That is until I dumped the first bucket of dirty water. Ho-ly COW. I am shocked at how disgusting that water was, and there was sediment along the bottom of the bucket too. I even vacuumed before I started. My hypothesis is that the carpets don’t look much different because I only cleaned a surface layer of dirt off. There was so much grime that I couldn’t get deep into the fibers of my carpet. The areas I cleaned the first day took 3 or 4 gallons of water with about 2oz of cleaner for each gallon.
The cleaner I used is Bissell Febreze Oxy Carpet Cleaner in the Hawaiin Aloha scent. I didn’t buy this product I borrowed it along with the carpet cleaner. The hyperlink goes to Walmart if you want more information on the product. Even though I couldn’t see too much of a difference on most spots on my carpet I definitely noticed a difference on how it felt when I was walking around on it. The carpet was kind of scratchy and grimy feeling before. Now it feels soft and my feet don’t pick up dirt as I’m walking around. Even right after I vacuumed my feet would still pick up pieces of dirt.
Above is the one spot in my house that I avoid touching at ALL COSTS. You can see that it is between the shower and the toilet which to begin with means there will be water. Then you add on that this is also the spot where we keep the plunger and toilet bowl cleaner. AND ITS CARPETED. Pretty please don’t barf all over your computer or phone or whatever else at the thought of how gross that is.
I used the attachment on the carpet cleaner to get into this corner and I think it did a pretty decent job of getting a lot of the grime out. I think the edges along the wall and bathtub are stained that way for the rest of the carpet’s life. Originally, I wasn’t planning on cleaning the bathroom carpets since we will be tearing it out soon and replacing it with vinyl planks. If you haven’t heard about that yet check it out here. However, I don’t know when we will be replacing the floor and just in case it doesn’t happen for a while it would be nice to have clean carpets in the mean time.
Little T’s bedroom before and after. Again, not much of a difference but you can see in the middle of the room on the left there was a dark spot that was removed (not just the lighting I promise :p).
Another angle of T’s bedroom. You can see by the doorway there was a dark spot removed. I’m thinking maybe it wouldn’t have hurt to go over the spots more than once and use more water but I didn’t want the floors to be really wet and have to wait forever to put furniture back.
At first glance in these pictures the room doesn’t look much different, but if you pay closer attention it almost looks like the carpet is yellowy in the first picture. I’m thinking that is actually due to the carpet cleaning since I edited both these photos the same and they weren’t taken very far apart. It looked cleaner in person anyway.
You can see in these pictures along the indent in the carpet a stain was removed. You can also see in these pictures how I got lazy and didn’t move all of the furniture. I would have if I had help but I was on a time crunch since I was moving out to my college apartment that night.
Again I think the carpet looks brighter in the after picture 🙂
The corner of the living room is much cleaner! The little black spot in the center was removed and the coloring of the carpet looks much more even.
Mostly in this picture it looks like it got worse but on the right hand side you can see it l looks more even. I honestly don’t know it looks worse in some parts???
From this angle you can definitely tell the carpet cleaner worked i’t’s magic. Right below the shadow of the couch on the left you can see a dirty yellowy area that I completely removed.
Well that’s the entire house! Add some furniture and you have a house tour 😉 Don’t worry I have one of those in the works. I almost felt silly at times writing this post because I knew what a difference the cleaning was making, but it just wasn’t showing up how I wanted in the pictures. Have you ever had a project that you felt great about but it just wasn’t translating on the blog scene? I think I also need to improve my picture taking skills so those fine details show through in photos. Let me know what you think!
See You Around!
Lauren <3
