This is my spotting guide and how to easily do everything you can to get the most value from your investment in carpet. This includes how to avoid common ways of ruining your carpet like rapid re-soiling of spots and overwetting.

FIRST, you want to try to pick up spills immediately. This involves using NO cleaner, and is the most important step. A wet / dry vac is ok, but usually blotting with a towel is enough. You’ve probably already stood on a towel after losing patience with blotting by hand. Yes, it’s surprising how much more that will get up from a liquid spill. A POULTICE just means you’re weighting down a towel and trying to approximate your body weight because you’re not going to stand there any longer. If you’ve been using paper towels, this is the stage where switching to a cloth towel makes sense; you can fold it over many times and to just the right shape for your spot. Added benefits of this approach include you now have no time pressure and can come back to babysit the progress at your convenience. While this process is very slow it will also remove more “stuff” than any machine built, but that all stops when your absorbent material is as wet as the carpet. Flip it over, change it, or whatever you need to do so that t’s dryer than the carpet. Weight pushing down combined with the towel being dryer than your carpet pulls moisture up, against gravity. It will dry very slowly since it’s covered.

Once that’s done everything it can, most of the problem is gone so whatever you use next you won’t need very much of it. This is hugely beneficial because getting the cleaner out is the most important part. Most of the time detergent is all you need. Get in the habit of saving trigger sprayers when you finish a bottle of cleaner. Wash it and dry it, then dunk it in your washing machine and you’ve got a correctly diluted detergent that’s designed not to foam up. Dish detergent probably cleans just as well but it’s designed to foam up and you don’t want that in your carpet. Applying it via a trigger sprayer will help you to not put down too much. While you can agitate it with your hand, the blunt edge of a butter knife also works well as long as you’re gentle. Once you’re satisfied everything’s gone and you’ve again poulticed everything out that you can, you want to lightly spray using a second bottle. Distilled white vinegar diluted at a rate of 2 ounces in a 16 ounce bottle is enough to neutralize the detergent, stopping the cleaning dead in its tracks and avoiding rapid re-spoiling. You’re using so little there’s no need to blot it up.

If the detergent didn’t work don’t use the vinegar solution yet, you need something stronger. You have a solvent in your home, rubbing alcohol. Again be very careful not to use too much! While this isn’t the strongest solvent made it’s readily available. Any solvent will evaporate quickly, so blotting up anything it dissolves is under time pressure. Avoid damaging fiber by scrubbing too much, but some agitation usually helps. Non oily nail polish is acetone, and usually only good with nail polish. That is VERY difficult to work with as it can dissolve the latex backing of your carpet and it evaporates even quicker. Hair spray is an old trick for ink, the propellants are a solvent. Once you’re satisfied with your work, it’s time for a light spray of the vinegar solution.

All of these steps also work in conjunction with specialty DIY products, mentioned above.