A really, really long post about the excitement of cleaning the carpet.

I live in non-BYU-approved housing (this is okay because grad students don't have to live in approved housing, just so you don't think I'm breaking the honor code or anything) and our landloard is a great guy, and very helpful when we need help, but for the most part just leaves us alone and lets us do what we want with the place, as he has done for all the previous tenants. On top of that, there is a tendency for a few roommates to leave and a few new ones to take their place, rather than having a group of students completely empty the apartment at once to be replaced by all-new tenants. The result is that the apartment has not received a thorough, check-out-time deep cleaning for at least two years (I moved in just under two years ago) and possibly much longer.

In particular, our carpet has not been touched for an awfully long time. I'm not terribly bothered by the carpet in my room because it looks reasonably clean as long as I'm vacuuming regularly (which I haven't been doing as much as I should since our vacuum cleaner is a little scary). But when I get on the floor to stretch after a run or do crunches or even just sit with my back against my bed to read a book, I wonder if I should be concerned. And sitting on the living room floor is a little bit scary. The couch is probably a little scary, too, but it's black so you can't tell as easily.

About this time last year, or maybe a little earlier, I opened the refrigerator and a bottle of teriyaki sauce came tumbling out. I swear all I did was open the refrigerator. It cracked open and the sauce began gurgling out. In panic, I picked up the fractured bottle and ran it to the garbage can, which sits in the adjoining (carpeted) hallway because there is no room in our tiny kitchen. I just wanted to dump the bottle before the entire thing leaked out onto the kitchen floor, but it didn't occur to me that the bottle would drip all the way to the trash can, and I spent the next half hour trying to scrub away a long, dark, teriyaki sauce streak in the hallway carpet. All I managed to do was smear it around so that it turned from a streak into a large, cloudy stain. I bought carpet cleaner the next time I was at the store and it helped a little, but the stain was dark and sticky for weeks, despite my best efforts. And then when enough people had rubbed dirt into it with the bottoms of their shoes it lost it's stickiness and became just a big dark smudge.

I have felt bad about it every time I walk into the hallway. It was kind of disgusting, actually, and it was all my fault. I talked about renting a carpet cleaner, but that's forty dollars (if you include the cleaning solution) and I didn't want to pay that much for a two-square-foot section of floor.

But for the last couple weeks my roommates and I have been talking about renting a carpet cleaner to take care of the whole apartment. We got excited about it, and finally, yesterday morning after going to the gym, I detoured to Macey's and rented a Rug Doctor and the biggest bottle of solution available, and over the course of the day, working in shifts, we managed to go through the entire bottle and clean every inch of carpet. I did my part in the evening, coming home at about five and working with small breaks for dinner, or organizing my room (as a consequence of moving furniture and straightening up before I attacked the carpet), and finally finished about 9:30.

It was kind of exciting. We got routines down - one person maneuvering the Rug Doctor while the other held the cord out of the way and filled a bucket with hot water and cleaning solution. We all made cries of disgust at the sludginess of the waste water that we dumped down the bathtub drain (two or three gallons were turned almost black by just a closet-sized section of carpet, and if we had the time, inclination, and money, it wouldn't have hurt to do the entire house at least one more time).

The culminating event of the experience was when I finally finished my room and (with the help of one roommate) the living room and got around to the teriyaki stain in the hallway. My roommates were downstairs in the large bedroom (the only place that was reasonably dry) watching a movie. I ran the carpet cleaner over a section of carpet, and then immediately dashed down the stairs in excitement to tell my roommates that they had to see this. They followed me up the stairs and cried out in amazement (literally cried out) at the contrast apparent at the line where the carpet cleaner had run - dark grayish brown next to a nice, clean, surprisingly light beige. "Why didn't we do this earlier?" wondered L*** aloud. And T*** got her digital camera and took two pictures - one of the contrasting sections of carpet and one of me standing proudly by the contrasting sections of carpet behind the Rug Doctor.

This morning when I got up the apartment still smelled slightly chemical, and the floors were still damp, but I derived a great deal of satisfaction from walking through the hall over the formerly-teriyaki-stained carpet into the kitchen. It was a long process, it was hard work, it kept me from working on my thesis (okay, I don't care too much about that one), but it absolutely made my week.