7 Tips to Keep Your Carpets Clean in Winter

With the winter months bringing guests and the snow, the carpets are simply bound to take on extra dirt and stains unless you take measures to protect them. The lighter the carpet color, the more important it is to stay on top of winter maintenance. These seven tips will help you preserve your carpets while the snow piles up outside.

Provide a Seat and Slippers

Keeping the dirt, salt and ice-melting products off the carpet begins with stopping it at the door. Family members can be trained to remove their shoes and boots before entering the main living space, but guests may not have an awareness of your home’s program. For some, bending and balancing to remove and replace shoes can be a tricky proposition. However, if you provide a little bench for them and a spare pair of slippers at the entryway, they can more happily accommodate your wishes.

Use Washable Walk-off Rugs and Runners

By placing mats or rugs at the entries to the home, a lot of filth can be caught before it has a chance to get into the home. If shoe removal isn’t practical or desirable at your place, at least try to catch the worst of it at the door. Then, lay down runners along the high traffic lanes from the entrances. Runners not only protect the carpet from snow-bearing shoes, but they’ll also keep the beaten paths in better condition for the rest of the year.

Use Garage Mats Under the Cars

The vehicles drag in more muck than any other “member” of the family. After a good snow, build-up from the road makes for nasty chunks of ice that fall off the underside of the car and melt all over the garage floor. A good garage mat can contain the dirty water full of de-icing solutions and salt so that you can avoid stepping in it and tracking it into the house.

Keep Porch and Patio Clean

To help abate snow penetration to the interior, be sure to shovel off the areas outside of the doors. If you leave a space for foot stomping to knock off as much snow as possible before coming inside, you can help stay on top of the chore to keep your carpets clean and dry.

Vacuum More Often

Simply vacuuming more frequently will go a long way to preventing winter dirt from traveling to the inner rooms of the home. If performed often, the dirt won’t have a chance to settle deep within the fibers, making deep cleaning more difficult.

Perform Frequent Spot-removal

Along with vacuuming more often, you should follow up by removing any spots that crop up. Mud can still make it past your front-line defenses in spite of your best efforts. If you jump on those wet spots as soon as you notice them, they should have little opportunity to set in. Use a good spotting solution. Grocery store solutions tend to leave some of the stain behind only to show itself again in a few days. But a commercial quality stain remover can offer much better results.

Call the Carpet Cleaning Service

Take heart that a few months from now, winter will yield to spring then summer again. Soon, it will be time to call Chet’s Cleaning Service for a thoroughly deep clean using our special 14-step process. By the time we finish, you’ll think your carpets never endured a Detroit winter.