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March 17, 2008
I am The Cat in the Hat
The first thing I do when I get home from a trip is freak out about how dirty my house is. On Saturday, I stood inside the entryway of our house staring down at my orange Ikea Saxan Rund rug and the collective foot-wipings of the past year and a half (the vacuum cleaner only gets out just so much, you know), and realized that I don't have any Woolite foaming rug cleaner in the house. My next though, since I'm really trying my hardest to be a bit more health and environmentally conscious, was that perhaps there was something less toxic I could use to clean the rug. You can clean just about anything with some combination of white vinegar, baking soda, and borax. Cue the internets.
I found a recipe for all-purpose rug cleaner that consists of equal parts vinegar, borax, and salt. I mixed up the stuff, finding that the borax and salt weren't quite dissolving in the vinegar. I dumped it on the carpet (and a spot on our living room area rug that's always bugged me, just for good measure), and scrubbed the stuff in using my little utility brush. Of course, the fine quality Ikea rug shed an alarming amount of orange fuzz, slightly discoloring the scrub brush, but so what. I now had a wet wool rug (and if I learned nothing else from last summer's "Let's felt a whole sheep" party in my friend's backyard, it's that vinegar and wool just don't smell very nice together) with clumps of salt all over it. Swell.
Wait 24 hours for the crap to dry. Vacuum. I now have dried-on patches of whitish salt and borax mixture in my carpet. A second scrub-brushing did loosen a little of it, but it still stinks like a wet, vinegar-y dog. I've sprinkled some Arm & Hammer carpet fresh on in in the hopes of at least making it smell less unholy. If anyone has any ideas for something to clean the cleaner out of my wool carpet, I'm open to suggestions. Stupid internets. Stupid tree-hugging hippies. Next time it's Clorox and petroleum products that smell fresher than a fake pine tree.