The difference in before and after is amazing! I was surprised, impressed, and excited to have conquered my fear of using a carpet cleaning machine.

Almost two years ago when I moved into this house, I replaced the raspberry sherbet carpet in the living room with a neutral beige-ish one, knowing it would be potentially difficult to keep clean even though we don’t wear our shoes in the house. The carpet actually held up a little better than I had expected but the traffic path from the kitchen was looking a little used. There were spots and splatters which I apparently didn’t do as good of a job cleaning as they happened as I had thought. Now? Now the whole carpet is like new both in look and feel; I love walking on it in my bare feet and feel like curling my toes into it (if the pile were longer).

A few weeks back I had been talking with a co-worker of mine and mentioned that I needed to clean the carpet before I replace it with laminate as my boyfriend is going to take it to replace his living room carpet provided mine fits in his space. She mentioned she had a Bissell cleaner (a Bissell Pro Heat), new in the box, and I was welcome to borrow it. Yesterday I picked it up and within a couple of hours my carpet was clean and beginning to dry.

Tightwad Tuesday for me this week is about saving money by a) cleaning my own carpet and b) borrowing (free!) a cleaner. It can’t get much cheaper than that. She even threw in a jug of the cleaning solution. I wish I had before and after pictures.

There are more frugal tips over at beingfrugal.net so scootch on over there and check them out.