Carpet Cleaning

Maintaining what you have is one of the best ways to keep from having to spend extra money to replace something. A huge example of this is carpets. In my house, carpet is everywhere except for the kitchen and bathrooms. If we had to replace our carpet it would be a huge expense.

We just moved into our house a little over a year ago, and since it was new, the carpet was new also. I keep up with the cleaning pretty well, especially in the high traffic areas of our living room/dining room, so I thought giving the carpets a thorough cleaning would be pretty simple. Over the last 3 weeks I've cleaned the carpets in the whole downstairs, as well as our stairs and upstairs hallway, master bedroom, and 3rd floor loft. My grandmother has a Hoover Steamvac, which I was able to borrow.

It is a pretty big project, so I was really glad that my mom was able to help me with the downstairs, especially when I did the stairs by myself - that was way harder! In preparation I vacuumed the whole downstairs, then mom and I got everything up off the floor. We moved some of the larger pieces, like our dining room table, but left the bookshelves and couches in place.

The Steamvac is great and pretty simple to use, but it does take a little while because you have to go back over the wet carpet a few times to remove the excess water. This is the tank that holds the water with the cleaning solution; it has a handle to carry and a built in measuring cup for the cleaning solution.

The best thing about it is that it really gets the carpet clean. The tank that holds the dirty water is pretty disgusting after using it, but it is the proof that the carpet is getting clean!

This is some of the dirty water - nasty!

And this is a huge clump of hair, dirt, dust - and I vacuumed the carpet right before I steam cleaned it! This was the loft, which has less traffic than the downstairs.

The scary thing to me is that my carpet was that dirty - we keep the house clean, we don't have any pets, and our house is new. It sure is incentive to keep up with my cleaning, and to routinely do some hardcore cleaning with the steamvac. This will keep our house clean for our every day living, and also help to keep the value of our carpet, which ads to the value of our house.

A steamvac like this one is actually pretty affordable. Here is a similar machine on Amazon priced at around $160 new. This comes with the stair attachment that I used too. My grandmother has had hers for over 10 years, so it has paid for itself several times over now.

I have also seen similar steamvacs on sale recently for around $100. The cost to rent a machine is around $50 and a steam cleaning service is even more, so this is an investment that will pay for itself very quickly.

I am marking my calendar to borrow my grandmother's steamvac in 6 months so that I can keep up with these carpets!