Homemade carpet shampoo

About a month ago, I decided to shampoo the livingroom. It needed it. It's whitish carpet and we have a dog, a cat, and a kitten who runs around here like she's barely tame.

And, let's face it... we aren't total neat freaks. Our house is tidy- for the most part- but it is very lived in. Shoot, I painted and stained the coffee table in here a few days ago :). And, I had some mishaps in a room upstairs this week too. Enough of my faults and on to my disgusting shampoo water....

I shampooed it with some homemade solution that I'll advise you NOT to try. It was mostly water, but had a rather large helping of laundry detergent in it (like maybe a cup?) and a smidge of vinegar. It isn't the ingredients that were bad... but I didn't have the best proportions going.  After a month, this is what we had...

Tracking. And just dirty, dirty carpet. Can you see the lines that run through the middle? This is THE highest traffic area in the room. Those lines are from the carpet cleaner dispersing my solution. And the dark spots of nastiness? Apparently my mixture was too foamy for the carpet cleaner and just right for looking clean temporarily.

So, today, I gave it another attempt. This time, I used MOSTLY all water, about 1 TBS of Gain, 1/3 cup of vinegar and about a TBS of OxyClean. It worked GREAT. It was still a bit foamy, but ended up being ok. Then, I went over the entire carpet with plain water and sucked it all up. I did this twice. Overkill? You tell me...

This sink of nastiness is after one rinse with just plain water in the cleaner. (Please note the lack of the first round with soap photo. Nasty.)

I'm sure that I could have done this ALL day and still would have had dirty water results. It never fails. Every time I clean the carpet, I am bound and determined that we are getting hardwood in this room. We are... it's just a matter of when :).

If you are thinking "oh, our carpets aren't that bad.." I dare you. Clean them. You will want to rip out every square foot of the stuff. 

If you try out your own cleaner like this, let me know. And, if you ever stop by here and I say "oh, I just cleaned the carpets, don't take off your shoes" I mean it. I don't want your crisp white socks wet with this nasty brown/green/gross water from my "clean" living room :).

Does the living room smell like vinegar? YUP. Will it fade? I hope. :)

It doesn't seem to bother the girls. They have congregated to the corner where I didn't go ALL the way to the wall though.

I won't mention that immediately after this picture was taken, a certain cleaner/blogger/photographer let the beagle outside where she immediately started digging. The cleaner/blogger/photographer thought the beag was after a snake so the digging was allowed. Needless to say... no snake... it was an ant hill. And I wonder why the "clean" carpet water is still so nasty :)

I also did the couch, love seat, and rocker. I used a different method on them though. More on that soon.