Banish Unpleasant Urine Stains From Your Carpet With This Handy Table Ingredient

Spills on the carpet are always irritating, but when the spilled liquids are bodily fluids, it can be even more grating on the nerves. The last thing you want is urine to seep into your carpets and end up with a long-term stench or visible stain. Fortunately, the only ingredient you may need to obliterate urine stains in carpets is plain old salt.

It may seem too good to be true, but it's a genius way to use salt around the house. The first rule for removing urine and preventing odors is to soak up as much of the urine as you can. This is usually done best by placing a few pieces of rolled-up paper towels directly on the wettest part. Make sure you have enough pieces since one or two won't be enough to soak everything up; you want to have more paper towels than needed.

To give an extra soaking boost, step onto the paper towel so it gets into the deepest part of the carpet and will pull out the moisture. While a stain may not look that wide, it can run deep within the carpet fibers, and you need to get all of the liquid out to prevent odors from getting trapped.

Paper towels will quickly soak up the immediate large puddles of urine, but they won't remove all the remaining urine. The next thing you want to do is pour table salt directly on top of the urine. In fact, cover it in salt, using so much that the stain is essentially inundated with it.

Let the salt do its job and leave it alone for a couple of hours. As it dries, it will lift the remaining urine from the carpet and leave behind dry salt. Once the area is completely dry, you can vacuum up the salt. This will also help deodorize the area since table salt is an odor eliminator. As it draws the moisture from the carpet fibers, it should take the smell with it. However, if you go through the process and the carpet is still wet, you may have to repeat it once or twice until it is completely dry.

This hack works so well precisely because it helps remove both the liquid and the odor, which is vital if you're hoping to avoid this kind of accident from happening again. Though you may no longer smell urine after cleaning your carpet, your dog or cat's sense of smell is amazingly heightened. Dogs have 100 million odor senses, and cats have 200 million (via Physician's Mutual). 

The fact that salt removes the odor is important because animals seek out their urine scent, either because they're marking their territory, they associate it with a sense of home and security, or just out of habit. This behavior is common in both dogs and cats. If they can smell their urine on the carpet, they will repeatedly pee again in the same place. To be extra careful, you may want to buy a store-bought carpet neutralizer that will help dismantle the scent from your rug and prevent your pet from staining your carpet again.