How to save money cleaning your carpet
August 11th, 2006 | by mbhunter |Burn them. Or rip them out.
Or hire a professional cleaner.
Counterintuitive? Money Dummy confessed to hiring a professional carpet cleaning service instead of renting a cleaner and sweating through the cleaning. It sounded like the professionals were the more expensive option per clean, but the results were much, much better.
From our experiences, it might be just as cheap to hire the professionals as it would be to do it ourselves, and pretty poorly at that.
When I was moving out of the apartment I was renting to my house, I had to clean the carpets in the apartment. I could either take care of it myself or have the landlord’s service do it for $50. I thought that I’d save money doing it myself. That did happen, but barely. The rental cleaner and the chemicals set me back $42. In addition, I had to do some fast talking to the landlord’s representative on the walk-through not to have to pay to have them cleaned again, because they weren’t cleaned as well as they needed. It would have been a lot easier to have paid the $50.
Recently, we cleaned the carpet in our hallway and dining room (pale-colored Berber) with a rental. It just wasn’t working; a lot of spots wouldn’t come out. So we broke down to hire a pro. This guy was cheap: he did the same rugs for $50, and they were clean like I had never seen before! It almost isn’t worth it to rent the cleaner!
4 Responses to “How to save money cleaning your carpet”
By ~Dawn on Aug 11, 2006 | Reply
I bought a carpet cleaning vacuum and have used it Many times, I’m still using the cleaning solution that came with it. After that, I may try a home-made variety….
Well worth the money!
By mbhunter on Aug 11, 2006 | Reply
We have one too. Our rugs needed the dirt kicked out of them, though.
By fivecentnickel.com on Aug 11, 2006 | Reply
We had our carpets professionally cleaned before putting out house on the market and it was well worth the money. We got our entire house (2100 sq ft, largely carpeted) for a little of $200. I would definitely do it that way again.