Being a cat owner requires a lot of patience and cleaning skills. Your carpet is one of the locations where cat litter may accumulate.
Cats also gather a bit of cat litter on their paws, usually accompanied by a small amount of soiling.
Since your cat will be walking all over your house, it can leave debris all over your carpets and floors, resulting in an unpleasant odour and challenging to clean.
Therefore, you should clean the cat litter as quickly as possible if you don’t want it to sink into the carpet. Read on to learn more about getting feline litter out of your fabric carpet.
Use a Paper Towel
If you detect the litter while it’s still moist, you can take a paper towel and try to gather the litter with it. I prefer paper towels since they are simple to dispose of after use and make it easier to clean up dry debris.
If the cat litter already has waste soaking in it, I recommend putting on some gloves.
You should be able to collect a large portion of the litter with a paper towel when it’s still wet, or you can wet to assist the debris attaching to it.
It is best to avoid using reusable sponges, kitchen towels or wipes in this situation since it is pretty challenging to remove the stench from the sponges after cleaning, which is not what you want in your home.
Allow the Kitty Litter to Dry
Wet litter can sometimes be challenging to remove from the carpet, especially if you decide to collect it all at once. If the carpet is wet, you should wait until it dries before proceeding to the next stop.
Unless the litter is fully dry, the best thing to do is air out for a short period. You can speed up the activity by placing a fan in the area. Doing this hardens the litter and makes cleaning simpler afterwards.
Use a Brush to Loosen the Litter
After you’ve removed the majority of the loose litter from your carpet and allowed it to dry, use a stiff bristles scrub brush to dislodge any stuck-in cat litter from the carpet fibres carefully.
Since waste becomes trapped after drying, brushing exposes the debris to allow easier removal. Brush the affected area in both directions to ensure that the entire region begins to loosen from the mat.
You don’t create a more challenging issue by having some of the litter move away while the other half clings. Again, please don’t imagine that using water would help.
Instead, moisture will become linked to the sticky litter, creating an adhesive-like effect that will make it cling even more deeply into your carpet, making it challenging to remove.
Vacuum the Affected Area
The scrubbing brush loosens the cat debris from the mat and leaves much of the litter at the top, whereby you can collect using a vacuum cleaner.
A vacuum cleaner completes the job in a couple of seconds by gathering litter that didn’t come off during the scrub brush.
When you find out how to use your regular vacuum to clean cat debris off your carpet, it will work just fine, but if you need something specific, a pet vacuum can work better.
You can also repeat the procedure on the area several times to get the stuck litter out as it may be trapped hidden in the carpet, and if it’s still not springing up, you need to check to see whether it’s dry.
Remember that you can’t vacuum wet litter simply because it’s wet. You’ll need to let it air dry and brush it again before cleaning.
Use an Odour Neutralizer
The last step is to apply an odour neutralizer or an air freshener to disinfect the area. This part is essential since if the cat litter had urine or pee on it, the odour would still stick on the carpet.
Ammonia is a typical culprit responsible for the stink and cannot be removed by scrubbing or vacuuming the affected area.
Bacteria are allured to pee in the fabric carpet, and those with an enzyme known as urease uses it to convert to ammonia.
Enzymatic cleaners eliminate odours by consuming the ammonia crystals and any available organic debris.
To deodorize the space, you can also apply a DIY solution of equal parts vinegar and water. Follow the two steps below:
- Dip a wet cloth into the mixture and apply it to scrub the area gently. Then for about ten minutes, allow the mixture to concentrate and merge with the carpet fibres.
- Allow it to dry and vacuum again.
Final Word
Hopefully, the above steps will help you get cat debris off your carpet. Eventually, the steps will help you save on time, and you will have eliminated cat litter effectively.