Clean an Area Rug - PEP BB nest.sand.cleanrug

My cat's favorite rug. It's unfortunately hard to see, but it's covered in a fine dusting of white cat hair. Also a few other bits as it's right by our door...


Here I am beating all the dust out.


Then, leaving the rug to be...


Finally, a few hours in the sun later...

This one was good for pent up energy. Maybe should have done a smaller rug!

So I used my area rug that is at the entrance of my backyard. The dog routinely uses this to clean his paws on so it was in need of a cleaning. The combination of the grey/brown color scheme hides stains and dirt really well, so I took the final pic outside so the extra light could hopefully showcase the difference.

I cleaned the front entry rug and it was a far more complicated venture than it should have been. For the sake of transparency, I'll go through the whole thing.

First of all, I decided to clean our entry rug. It had a fair bit of dirt that we'd tracked in and needed attention. The tricky part was that stain you see in the corner. That's cat pee, the evilest of all stains. Several of our neighbors let their cats roam and our indoor cats think they need to defend the territory by peeing at the entrance door. They have a litter box by the door, but sometimes they still pee outside of it.

As per the instructions, I took the rug out and beat it. It was small enough that I swung the rug against the porch pillar instead of hanging it up. I got a video of a few good swings.

Next, I soaked the stain in an enzymatic cleaner called "Simple Solution." Here is a link to the product page: https://simplesolution.com/node/206. I'm not sure if it's PEP approved, but it usually works for these stains when nothing else I've tried has. I'd be interested in hearing about more natural ideas. After soaking the stain for about 15 minutes, I hosed it down so that the water would run toward the weedy lawn. Simple Solution has detergent in it so I didn't want to rinse it into the veggies, but the lawn should be fine.

Now, to clean the spot where the rug was. I sprayed Simple Solution around the door both inside and out to get any of my cats' residual pee as well as any of the neighborhood cat pee. I wiped that up with paper towels. Then I sprayed a solution of Medina Orage Oil (https://medinaag.com/product/orange-oil/), water, and a drop of Dawn dish soap around the door both inside and out. That helps confuse the scent and deters the cats from peeing there. It should keep working as long as I remember to refresh the scent about once per week. I forgot to do that which is how I got into this issue.

After it dried in the sun for a few hours, I put the rug back. Now I'll lay down for a nap and those cute little stinky cats will probably want to cuddle.

Cleaning my entry rug and leaving it in the sun all day. No additional cleaning method this time, sometime a little water and a brush.

Edit: sorry, having a hard time sharing a video and embeding it. Rejecting post and losing BV points is hard when it's only for a missing video or picture... 😥

The time has come to do battle with the rug.
Yeah, we live on a farm and that means a lot of dust and mud. This rug needs more than being cleaned every two weeks. Oops.
I only beat the rug this time, we should have it deep cleaned soon though.

Bethany Paschall wrote:The time has come to do battle with the rug.
Yeah, we live on a farm and that means a lot of dust and mud. This rug needs more than being cleaned every two weeks. Oops.
I only beat the rug this time, we should have it deep cleaned soon though.

This rug did sit in the sunlight for two or three hours, no other cleaning processes were done besides beating and sunning it, sorry for forgetting to say so earlier.