Remove latex paint from carpet
Have you recently put a fresh coat of paint on your home’s interior walls or did a bit of touch up work in odd spaces? Take a look at the ground and see if you notice any colorful specks on the carpet. Despite how careful you may have been, it is not always easy to keep the material on the desired surface.
Plenty of homeowners overestimate their brushing skills; using gobs of the paint is only begging for a mess. Thankfully, paint is not a difficult substance to extract from carpet, even if it has had time to penetrate the surface fibers. You only need a few trusty tools to remove latex paint, and these are a bucket of warm water, a mild cleaning detergent and a washcloth.
Paint problems? No worries!
The first step could be the longest depending on how much paint was spilled. Attempt to blot as much as you can with a dry washcloth; do not apply water to the carpet until most of the paint has been soaked up. Be sure to rinse the washcloth (sponges also work well for this job) thoroughly before re-blotting, or else you could end up spreading the paint around further.
After this is done, mix your cleaning solution (one teaspoon of detergent for every cup of warm water is the recommended ratio). Proceed to blot the paint stain one more time with the cleanser, and finally allow enough time for the carpet to air dry. You should never scrub any stain until it has been blotted beforehand, let alone latex paint, as this will only make matters worse.
When dealing with dry and oil-based paint spills
As you may expect, the cleaning process takes a bit longer for dry paint. Tackling this project will require the use of a putty knife and needle-nose pliers; the carpet should be scraped and any remaining chunks of paint can be safely removed.
Shall we save the worst for last? While latex paint spills are usually easy to clean, oil-based paint can be a different story. A steam cleaner works best here, as does paint thinner and/or hydrogen peroxide. A word of warning before you start; your carpet may become slightly discolored as a result. For this reason, large-scale cleanups are best left to a carpet cleaning professional!