Like most of the people I call friends, I have a touch of the Obsessive-Compulsive. I wouldn’t call my level of it a disorder, per se, but I’m definitely what people would call “anal” about things. Like cleaning. With two large dogs and two young boys, my house is definitely not spotless, but generally speaking, at any time during the week, random strangers, say…the Harlem Globetrotters, could drop by and I wouldn’t be too embarrassed.
Recently, one of my ageing dogs puked on the carpet before I could get her to the door. After sponging up as much of the bile (yummy!) as I could, I got out our handy-dandy SpotBot to clean up the rest. The SpotBot is this little vacuum thingy that you just sit on top of the spot after filling it with cleaning solution, press a button and Presto! It cleans it for you in about two minutes.
The only drawback to the SpotBot is that it’s very small. As you can see from the picture below, it cleans a very small area. In fact, this “clean” area you see before you is the result of having moved the SpotBot three times.
Now, you may be asking yourself, “Did you put bleach in the water? Cuz, you’ve got one bright white spot there.”
The answer is “Nope. No bleach. That area is just REALLY clean compared to the surrounding carpet.” Now, I regularly use one of those home carpet cleaners, which I thought did a pretty good job, but I was apparently (dare I say, “horribly”) wrong.
Now, I have company coming in town this weekend, and a family get-together for my youngest son’s first birthday, and I have this un-ignorable bright white spot on my carpet that I will forever be explaining to people is NOT a bleached out spot and that apparently the rest of my carpet is just REALLY dirty! Not a conversation I want to have ad nauseum.
That leaves me three, no four options really.
- Employ the SpotBot roughly 300 times to clean the entire living room carpet
- Get on my hands and knees with carpet cleaner and a scrub brush and see what I can do manually
- Go rent a proper cleaner from the grocery store
- Call in the pros
Of the four choices, I don’t have time for three of them, and I don’t really want to spend money on the fourth. What to do, what to do?
You know, in the time it took me to write this, I could have moved the SpotBot twice already!
Postulates & Pastimes 
That picture is hilarious. We have a little Bissell cleaner, but I secretly wanted the Spot Bot (but was too cheap to buy it). I was regretting this decision several weeks ago when the Dog became sick (and not the vomit kind of sick.)
I vote for option #4.
I know it is too late, but telling the visitors that the child/spouse spilled bleach on the floor is an option. The other would a be a large planter over the spot with a plant that “you are trying to revive” by putting near the light!
Ha ha! I have over the years learned that the pros do it better and cheap enough that it’s really no big deal, Call them!
Hey I found you via Allison’s blog, and I totally learned something new today! In other words I have never seen or heard of the Spotbot, but its cleaning abilities are almost at the frightening alien-efficient level…I think you’re going to have to stay up all night and put that Spot-bot to work!….I know that sucks, but your carpet will be sparkling at the end! 😉
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