Be Excellent To Each Other

I just knocked over a cup of very sugary tea on a nice cheap large rug... I've dabbed it and put it upright to run out. I'm going to get some upholstery spray first thing.

Does anybody have any good methods for cleaning tea out of carpet? :( Thanks

If the world works like the red wine stain with white wine trick, spilling coffee on it should do the trick.

But for serioz, Vanish?

The spray or the powder, or both? There's a lot of Vanish stuff...

Oi dunno. I guessed. I'm a useful!

Tesco carpet and upholstery cleaner (yellow trigger spray bottle) works well. Try not to let the stain dry, is your most important thing. Rinse with water if you have nothing to hand, but shampoo (for hair) will work ok in a pinch. Massage a little in, dab out excess suds with a tea towel, rinse. Vacuum any residue once dry.

The carpet spray is better though as the foam is controlled.

If you need to use a lot of water to get the stain out, put a bin bag under the rug, first, so it doesn’t soak through to your floor or carpet. To dry your rug (only once the stain is out, don’t dry it before cleaning it as the stain will set), fold a large towel, place it 4 layers thick on the wet patch, and stand on it for a minute, shifting your weight around to cover the towel. This will draw the water into the towel. Repeat with dry towels.

Since having Darwin I’ve cleaned a lot of carpets and rugs

Or! Spill a load more tea and enjoy your new brown rug!

Put on a beret, smoke a gauloises and call it art.

Cover the whole carpet with tea. That way no one will notice.

Spill some coffee, wine, ketchup, mustard etc over it and sell it to Vanish as a benchmark for their cleaning products. Or get Barry Scott round, film it and put it on YouTube

Have kids, or pets, (or, stupidly, lots of both) then your house is basically trashed all the damn time and eventually you stop caring.

Probably a longer term option though and not the quick solution you were after

Thank you Mimi :) I got some carpet mousse from Savers and I'm trying that. Bin bags were a great idea!

Did it work?

The first couple of months after we adopted the pup we spent a lot of time dealing with widdle and little jobs on our carpets. The monkey would NOT use the puppy training mats we bought, preferring to rip them to shreds most of the time.

When it was really a losing battle and increasingly pongy, we hired Rug Doctor (TM) to deep clean, but initially it just seemed to make it worse. A second run at it made a great improvement. In the end we bought a Vax carpet cleaner, which will work out cheaper and more convenient than the Rug Doctor in the long run.

I had my carpets cleaned professionally a few weeks ago. They came up like new so I was pleased.

Was it expensive?

£115 for the living room, hall, stairs and landing... oh, and a couple of rugs too so I dunno. Is that the going rate? He worked hard too! He was here from 10-3.

The carpets were in a right state too. Loads of mysterious stains since the kids have been around but they've come up as good as new.