OK, this little carpet cleaning mix sounds absolutely crazy to me, but you know what? It actually does work!
It’s especially good if you have smelly pets hanging around (like I do) and if your carpet picks up that smell and then seems to hold on to it for all eternity (like mine does).
So here’s my living room, home of the dog smell that never seems to go away.
Well, you can see why. At almost any time of the day, you can find Chuck hanging on in his spot on the couch…
…or under the table on the carpet.
The carpet, being all fluffy like it is, seems to absorb the smells so much more than the couch. Plus the couch covers get a regular cleaning in the washing machine, and that just can’t happen with the rug. Of course, the dog can get a good cleaning and he does, but those baths never seem to stick for more than five minutes, he’s a dog after all. That’s just how he smells. It seems that Chuck is a little bit of a manly man too, because the idea of doggy cologne just scares him.
I’ve tried a few different things here and there to try and freshen things up, and nothing really seems to do the job quite right. I’ve done baking soda, and cinnamon, and essential oils on the vacuum filter to try to get a fresh scent going, but no luck with keeping the smell away for any length of time.
I read about this somewhere and I gave it a try. Why not?
As always with me, it’s totally simple:
2 cups of Corn Meal
1 cup of Borax
Mix it all together and you’re all set. I also decided to get a little creative with it and added in a few drops of essential oil. I thought I would use something fresh-smelling, but that also has some cleaning/bad stuff-killing properties, so I used tea tree oil. Some people really hate the smell, but I think it smells nice and fresh. Cinnamon oil would be a good choice too.
Everything got tossed together in a big mason jar and mixed up really well.
The next step is just to sprinkle it over the area you want to clean and leave it on for an hour.
You can also take a cloth and rub it in a bit, but I didn’t. I just let it do its thing.
After about an hour, everything gets vacuumed up. That’s it!
The fresh smell from the essential oil only lasted a few hours, but the dog-free smell remains! It’s really pretty exciting. The rough texture of the corn meal also really helped to get into the fibers of the rug and fluff it up really nicely.
It’s been about a week now and that ever-lasting dog smell really does seem to have been absorbed by the mixture and taken away. I’ll definitely be keeping up with this one on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, (or fortunately, I’m not sure which) I don’t have a scratch and sniff blog quite yet, so I can’t show you the difference in smell in here, but if you happen to have some of these basic ingredients around anyway, or you think your carpet might have a weird smell to it, it’s worth trying out and seeing for yourself!
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.