Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Getting Wax Out of Carpet

Awhile back, we had to move Matt out of his old apartment.  While the guys were moving the big furniture, I was left with the task of cleaning (I definitely wanted that deposit back).

I discovered this near the front door:





















Sorry for the terrible pictures.  All I had on me at the time was my phone.

Matt had a Scentsy plugged into an outlet near the floor and someone must have knocked it over.

It was not pretty and it was deep into the carpet. I didn't know what to do since that would obviously show in the final walk through.  So I plugged in my hair dryer and sat on the floor with a roll of paper towels.  I figured the heat would melt the wax and the paper towels would soak it up.  I applied direct heat to it on the hottest dryer setting. Then I'd move the dryer for a second and blot it up with a paper towel. (I tried holding the paper towel on the wax while I heated it up, but it got too hot on my hand.)






















It took a while and quite a few paper towels, but it eventually came up.
Here's what it looked like at the end:





















It left some red behind, but I think that's the dye in the wax rather than the wax itself. I think if I had more time and patience, I could have gotten more to come up, but for the most part, it looks pretty good. When I stood up, I couldn't even see the stain.

I have also heard that you can use an iron and it will do the same thing, but I don't know what the best way to do that would be. Has anyone done that? How did it turn out?

1 comment:

  1. This is a great tip! To answer your question, I once used the iron method to get up wax from a carpet and it worked well! I think we just laid town a paper towel in between the rug and the iron and it sort of drew the wax up and out of the carpet and onto the paper towel. But that was back in college, so my memory may be a bit fuzzy. Your method seems to have worked well!

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