Cream Carpet vs Red Jello

Sandy Rettschlag

4 years ago

red jello Has anyone had a problem or a mishap that felt like an impossible problem when it came to cleaning of any kind? Well, I did. Several years ago, actually many years ago, we had just put down a light cream carpet throughout the main floor of our home. I had gone grocery shopping and having to transport children from one point to another, left the bags of groceries on the cupboard. Having the lovely puppy that we had at that time, who liked to go through my grocery bags, she found a cherry jello mix. Unfortunately, she took this box of jello into the living room, under the library table which can be seen over most of my living area. Consequently, after opening the box of jello, licking this over and over there was a bright red stain about the size of a basketball on our new “cream” carpet. I was hysterical, to say the least.

After having a fit as you can imagine, I started trying every chemical known to man to get this horrible stain out of the carpet to no avail. Lastly, I called a professional carpet service who tried their cleaning techniques which resulted in leaving a still very visible stain. It was suggested that I use bleach, little by little to see if it could be removed. Well, I tried this bleaching method doing a little at a time which didn’t help at all. So, as a last resort, I put straight bleach on the stain which now resulted in a pure white stain that showed up almost as much as the bright red stain. I stewed on this dilemma, went and bought Rit dye trying to find the color of my carpet. This was unsuccessful. So, after contemplating my options I decided that the closest thing to the color of my carpet was the paint I had on my walls. So, you guessed it, I painted my carpet with the same paint I used on my walls. Guess what? It worked. It was not perfect, but close. You just spread the paint on with your fingers, fluffing and separating the strands of the carpet, and let it dry.

This was my solution and it lasted for many years until the time we tore out the carpet for hardware floors. It was quite funny to see the expression of the professional carpet cleaning service when I had them come to do a cleaning of the entire carpet to be told that this spot was actually a painted area. They thought I was nuts. I thought it was a genius act on my part.

So, I felt another cleaning mishap was solved and would be used, if necessary, in the future.