The front porch of my cottage house has been shot about a dozen times for different magazines and TV shows.    For the very first shoot, I thought it would be fun to take an antique runner rug (that I found in the house when I bought it) and run it down the length of the screened-in porch.   This photograph above is from Country Home magazine and I think it represents the simple idea of using outdoor spaces as new indoor spaces.    Anyway, that said, this was shot several years ago and for this entire length of time, this rug as been outdoors…on the porch…through several summers, falls and winters.

Visiting the cottage the other day to clean it up, take down Christmas decorations and pick up some packages (it can be a pain managing two houses, I admit), I thought this rug would look better in my craft room at the other house.  So I rolled it up, threw it over my shoulder and plopped it in my car.   The rug, to say the least, was dirty.    Man oh man… like Pig Pen dirty.

So I took the Dyson vacuum to it to thoroughly clean it, on both sides, and look how much dirt came out of it.   The entire filter is clogged with dirt.   Makes you want to sneeze, right?    

Then I grabbed the Bissell little green cleaning machine I had stashed away in the closet.   It’s made with recycled plastics and it does a great job cleaning carpets and upholstery, but I honestly never had a real use for it… until now.   I filled the clean water canister with tap water and squirted about 4 doses of the new Method Laundry detergent as the cleaning agent.    The Method detergent has a new revolutionary formula that reverses the molecules to  have the cleaning agents on the outside of the molecule and the H2o molecules on the inside.   Yeah, I don’t get it either.  All I know is that it works.   Anyway, off I went and doused the whole rug with water and used the machine to suck up all the dirty water.

Gross!   It’s amazing how much bedded-in dirt this machine picked up.   But because it’s just dirty water, I poured it outdoors at the base of a forsythia plant.    We’ll see if that was a smart decision come April!

And here’s the clean rug in the craft room.   I did move it from this spot to now be a runner from the door along the length of the room.   It’s a nice cozy addition to the craft room/office.   In the morning, I’ll run outside to grab a pile of wood to use in the wood burning stove to get the room warm and toasty.    There’s something warming about having carpet to keep your feet warm as you dash into the chill of the morning.

Tags: Bissell, Cleaning, Country Home, Method, Rugs

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 1:59 am and is filed under Home Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.