The Tool That'll Become A Staple For Cleaning Up Your Carpet

Cleaning carpets can be tricky. Dry messes like dust and hair can be vacuumed, while wet spills can be sopped up and shampooed if necessary. But how should you go about cleaning up wet, solid material messes like spilled spaghetti or freshly-watered soil from a houseplant? The instinct here might be to grab paper towels or cleaning rags to lift up as much of the mess as possible. However, these items can actually press stains further into the carpet's fibers. The instinct to lift up the solids before attacking the stain is the correct one, but in order to get the solids up in the most effective way without further staining the carpet, there's an item from your toolbox that works best: a putty knife.

Putty knives are generally used to spread materials (such as putty) onto wood, drywall, and the like. They have flat, flexible blades that can vary in width depending on their intended use. It's that unique blade that allows the putty knife to be ideal for scraping solid waste off of carpets.

The most common ways that people try to pick up solid spills on carpets tend to actually spread the stain rather than contain it. Whether the mess is the result of falling leftovers or the process of house-training a new puppy, the last thing you want to do is widen the area while trapping scents, bacteria, and stains deep within the carpet's fibers. Rather, you want to be able to cleanly lift the mess off of the carpet, then move it to the trash can for disposal. The flat, flexible blade of the putty knife does this wonderfully.

If your carpet gets covered with solid waste, use a dustpan and a putty knife on the area. Slide the leading edge of the putty knife under the waste that needs to be removed. As the blade is flat and not chiseled, it doesn't shift or break apart the mess but rather gets entirely underneath it. This can then be lifted and dumped onto the dustpan. Do this as many times as necessary to pick up all the solids, then empty the dustpan into the trash, at which point you can spot clean the carpet.

Obviously, if you watch a mess happen on your carpet in real time, you can quickly and easily clean it up with this putty knife trick. However, this tool is also useful if your mess has dried and stuck onto the surface of your rug. Putty knives can also be used for scraping, which is what makes them useful for removing stuck, dried-on messes.

For this problem, place a bag of ice on the area for about 20 minutes. For especially sticky messes like chewing gum that's stuck in your carpet, the ice will drastically lower the temperature of the mess, loosening the item's adhesion. After you've let the ice sit on the area, you should be able to cleanly scrape away the mess with your putty knife. Once again, after you've scraped it off the carpet fibers, simply lift the debris onto your dustpan and empty it into the trash. You're now equipped to handle any kind of messes your friends and family could make.