If you have carpet on your floor you will no doubt know that having carpet cleaning done on a regular basis will keep it looking bright and fresh all the time. But regular does not mean often. According to Brilliance Cleaning, Six to twelve months is usually enough, depending on whether you have pets and toddlers. Professional cleaning done more often than that simply causes unnecessary wear the tear to the carpet, plus it disrupts your life while you wait for it to dry.
So what happens when you have tradies coming through the house to renovate or repair it? You can’t expect them to take their boots off at the door; they have to wear them on the job for protection. But if the route to their job leads across your carpet it is highly likely to get very dirty, especially if the weather is wet and they’ve had to tread on unpaved areas to get to your door.
Even if they care enough to wipe their boots on the doormat, there will still be dirt left on that will be trodden into the delicate fibres of your lovely carpet before you can blink. So what can you do to prevent this? Here are a few options to save your carpet from the tradies’ boots.
- Cover the carpet with that roll of old carpet in the garage that you bought as a bargain from a garage sale. Make sure the back of it is really clean – or you could lay it topside down and let those boots walk over the back of it.
- Cover it with a tarp. Make sure it is not a thin plastic painting protection tarp as it could easily tear. And anchor the sides and ends so your tradie doesn’t trip over it, or flip it up as he stomps across, then tread on the carpet underneath the next time he goes past.
- Reroute the tradie so he doesn’t have to walk on the carpet. Perhaps he could come in another door. This all depends on your floor plan and where he has to work.
- Buy mats to make a path over your carpet. New mats will be nice and clean and hopefully, the tradie will walk on them and not between them.
- Roll the carpet up and leave it like that until the job is done. This will only be easy if your carpet is not nailed down along the edges. Roll up the underfelt too.
There is sure to be at least one option above that you can use to save the carpet. Or if you are highly organised, you can make sure the renovations or repairs coincide with the time you usually have the carpets cleaned. Then it won’t be a problem.
