Furni-dents Follow-up

Some (like maybe 5 of you) may remember my very first post that I wrote, about ironing the carpet, found here, which removes the appropriately named "Furni-dents."  Well, this weekend, we decided to move around the couch and stuff to see if we can open the room up any.  As though who have visited our house know, our living room is the mecca of all things happening in our house.  We have the TV, toys, couch, chair and a plethora of other stuff, so the challenge of opening up our little room seemed a pipe dream.  Anyway, as you can see where this story is going, we were left with the undesirable furni-dents.

I used the trick of ironing out the carpet, and once again, received some fabulous results.

Above is a before picture.  Nasty dents in the carpet. 

Above is the after shot.  The discolouration seen in the picture is from a little moisture that was left over after the steaming, which of course, goes away once the carpet fully dries.

Once again, a word of caution to be careful, as it is easy to melt your carpet if the iron actually touches the carpet.

-d

Useful Tip of the Day - Spray n' Wash

So most everyone has heard of this product to effectively (for the most part) remove stains from clothes, but what about in other places?  Well, I find that Spray n' Wash (the kind in the picture below) is most useful in removing stains in carpets.  If you are one of the lucky few that doesn't have carpets in your dwelling, well, I am jealous and you can go and make one of the fine recipes found on this wonderful blog.  But, so the rest of you, Spray n' Wash is a fantastic solution to carpet staining problems.

I used this little bottle of joy today to remove a few old stains that were spotted on the carpet that I finally said "OK, I will try to clean them" after many weeks of looking at them and saying "I should really clean those up."  I used to use a product called Prosolve Pet Stain Remover because a)we have a pet and b)you would think that pets would produce the toughest stains.  This product worked OK.  You spray it onto the effected surface, wait 5 minutes, and dab off with a moist sponge or something.  Most of the time, it worked fine, but there were still some occasions that it did not remove all of the stain.  Enter the Spray n' Wash.  

In my quest for cleanliness, I decided to use some of the Spray n' Wash pictured above.  It has to be the Oxy stuff, as the other kind doesn't work as well.  I mixed about 4 parts water with 1 part of the Spray n' Wash in a little bowl and use a little scrubber brush to work into the carpet fibres, wait a few minutes and dab up.  Every stain came off of the carpet.  

So, why buy a specialty carpet stain remover when you can use something that you likely have in your house in the first place?

-d

Ironing the Carpet

So I never thought that my first post would be on some sort of useful house hold activity. Since we have another baby coming, we have decided to move around some furniture in the living room to make room for even more baby stuff! I, being the wonderful husband that I am, decided to move a shelving unit full of movies down into the dungeon (the basement). It weighs a ton, so when I removed it from its resting place for the previous three years, there were some serious carpet dents (you know, those indentations that are left when heavy things are stationary for an extended period of time).  

Me being me, these bothered me to no end, so I decided to do a little research on line to see if there were any methods to remove, or hell, even lessen the visibility of said marks. There were two methods that I found that people were talking about. One was to take an ice cube and place it in the dent. Apparently, after the ice cube melts and starts evaporate, that will fluff up the carpet. This seemed a little odd to me, and with the size of the indentation it would have taken until we move to another house to get the indentation out. In addition, the carpet would be like a swamp with all the ice I would need to use. Also, what I don't understand is why an ice cube? Why not just pour a little water on the area? Seemed a little odd to me.  

The second method was to take a shirt and an iron, with the iron set on steam. The idea being that the steam would penetrate (hehe) into the carpet and lift the dented fibers up. The shirt was used as a barrier between the iron and the carpet to prevent the carpet to melt (because the carpet is nylon, so high temperatures = bad news). I decided to try this method, because the area that the dent covered was large, and I thought after likely five years, that the iron should be used at least once. To my complete and utter amazement, after about two minutes and a whole whack of steaming the area, the dents were completely gone. Now I have to go to all the other areas in the house and start to iron the carpet like a mad man.  

-d  

Edit: Apparently, the official name for these furniture dents is Furnident! Thanks Karin.
P.S. This is a repeat post from the 29 Minute Mark