Flooring for families with the best stain removal tips
Have you ever had a stain somewhere at home that you have gone through endless products trying to remove? Have you got wine on the carpet or nail varnish on the sofa? Kids spill things much more frequently than adults! Choosing the right soft furnishings and flooring for families is so important. Whatever your dilemma these tips may help you out.
If you have paid for something special like Engineered wood flooring it will usually have a coating on to prevent stains so a quick wipe as soon as something is spilt should be fine. For this reason, it is the perfect flooring for families. This is why when choosing your flooring it is always good to go for wooden flooring with a quality finish. Especially with young kids!
If on the other hand, you have a carpet with stains on here are some tips to help you.
Removing wine from carpet
White wine can usually be removed by immediately blotting with a clean rag and then gently sponging with a solution of washing up liquid and water.
Red wine is a little trickier to remove. Again you can try blotting it and using the solution above but this may not always work especially for a deep red wine. Covering the wine with salt can help greatly or washing with hot water. If you have a rug the best way is to wash from behind with hot water. A carpet is less effectively cleaned this way but if you have tried the other options it is work a try.
Removing bodily fluids from carpets
Children have not got the ability when bleeding to stay still have they? Running to you and dripping it everywhere you soon have loads to clean up. As you know the best way to clean blood is with cold water. Another thing to try is hydrogen peroxide but to be honest, best avoided if possible as it may bleach your carpet. For a more natural option try is making a salt paste with a little cold water. Apply it to the stain and then leave for 5 minutes, do not rub it, then blot the stain with a clean dry cloth until it has gone.
Vomit is not the most pleasant thing to clean up and definitely much easier with a wooden floor than with carpet. If you have vomit on the carpet though first scrape off any sold pieces and excess fluid. Then simply use hot water to clean as well as possible. If you have faeces on the carpet this can be cleaned in the same way.
Removing coffee from carpets
Again with flooring for families, a wooden floor is easy to quickly wipe and will rarely stain, a carpet, on the other hand, can be a bit of a nightmare! The first thing to do if you have knocked coffee onto a carpet is to soak as much of the liquid up with a cloth as you can. Then using hot water gradually sponge the stain until it disappears. When a cloth is saturated and coloured swap for a clean one and then continue this until it is gone. Think of this as gradually diluting the coffee.
Removing permanent marker from cotton and walls
A bonus tip here for you from my personal experience. If you darling child draws on cotton curtains with a black permanent marker and then onto painted walls, don’t panic. Ben did this when he was younger. I was not impressed!
After a lot of googling, I used hairspray on the painted wall. Spraying it to the pen and then wiping off a few times until it disappeared. The cotton curtain ( a lovely sage green colour incidentally!) was a different ball game entirely. That removed by using milk. It took some time of soaking it in milk then sponging with water and repeating but it actually removed the stains perfectly!
Do you have any great tips for choosing flooring for families? There are more carpet cleaning tips here if you are still struggling. If I had another little one (not likely!!), I would definitely look at wooden floors and minimal soft furnishings. Dealing with stains is not something I, or any other parent, would ever enjoy!