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Think you've tried 'em all? Carpet cleaning has become a mystery to so many that most have just given up and turned to wood or tile - much easier to clean of course, but is it really the solution? Well, not for everyone. Wood and tile are fine, beautiful in fact. But they just don't compare to the warm, cushy feel of carpet beneath your feet when you climb out of bed during the night or first thing when you hit the floor on a cold winter's morn. Or, if you're like me, I'm a floor sitter, I simply like soft flooring. My dilemma of course, is that I have pets. One, being a very stubborn cat who has the extremely distasteful habit of spraying my carpet - and she's not fussy where she does it; as long as it's carpet.

I've also had the joy of a plumbing leak that rotted a portion of my carpet. Not an easy fix! At first, I ran to the nearest pet story and grabbed the biggest bottle of Pet/Urine remover that I could find. I applied it directly at first - but the odd, kind of chemical smell wasn't much better and it didn't last long enough to satisfy. Back to the pet store I went - I purchased another brand...(this was getting expensive at nearly $20.00 per bottle!) This time I put it into my carpet steam cleaner and believed that if I could spray it evenly with the carpet steam cleaner, and really let it soak in, then I'd be able to fix this problem for good. After all, once the smell of cat urine was completely gone from my carpet, so would her desire to spray it (be gone) right? WRONG! She was back at it in no time flat.
I tried sprinkling baking soda and topping it with vinegar, suggested by a friend, but my house smelled like a salad for a few days - which was apparently distasteful enough for the cat to stay away - for a time...but I'm not convinced the carpet was really "clean".
The carpet steam cleaner with the brand name chemical solution that the company recommends seemed to loosen up the dried urine that had saturated down to the pad - and the smell was awful for the first day afterward - but then it dissipated and it seemed for a while that I had resolved the problem. But again, it was back... my patience and enjoyment of my home were dwindling.
Finally, I read that club soda with a Listerine chaser would help... I was ready to try it. So, armed with a full bottle of Club Soda I poured and poured and let it set. It seems that the carbonation has a similar "breaking up" effect as the original brand name chemical solution used with the carpet steam cleaner. Then I put one cup of Listerine (the original) into my carpet steam cleaner with one gallon of water and steamed the worst areas. This combination seems to be the answer. The smell was gone, the room smelled a bit medicine-y at first, but it was clean, lasted longer and certainly less expensive than the others and probably a much healthier 'solution' as well. A bit more environmentally friendly and it killed any bacteria that had developed from the rotted area - although it had a tinge of green which this method did not fix. Ultimately I did replace that area of the carpet - with tile.

Learn more about this author, Lisa Weinstein.
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