My DIY Steam Cleaning Experience

Published July 7th, 2008

For those of you that don’t particularly care about doing your own steam cleaning, you may want to read on anyway.  This post isn’t only about how I saved a significant amount of money by cleaning my own carpets, it’s also about some other interesting side-effects that happened along the way.

Many posts have been written lately about the hidden cost of doing things yourself.  I think that you have to take a step back and look at the big picture.  First, I’ll tell you my story, then I’ll summarize the main points in a pros and cons list, which may help you to decide whether it’s worth your while to do this task yourself.

We have two wonderful, but very furry and dirt-loving dogs, one with allergies :(  We also have carpet in 60% of our home.  The result:  12 feet running back and forth across our carpets several times a day.  The immediate solution:  Steam cleaning said carpets.

When I was in university, my parents and I bought a new townhouse for me to live in while I finished the last 5 years of my schooling.  I lived there with my yellow Lab, Naula, and rented out the other rooms in the house to other students.  Every summer before the new people moved in, we had the carpets cleaned.  A couple of years I did it myself, but when I was busy we would get a company like Sears to come in and do it, which wasn’t a big deal because I would write it off anyway.

Since building our own home, we are continuing the practice of cleaning the carpets at least once a year.  Since I knew we would have to pay for everything out of pocket, I did some homework to see just what the price difference would be between hiring someone to do it, and finding a rental and doing it myself.  About 1000 square feet of our home is carpeted, that’s about 8 “rooms” according to the steam cleaning people.  The best deal I found was $99 for 4 rooms and tax, which would have come to about $230.    Our local Zellers was the only place I saw steam cleaners for rent in our town, so I asked about it.  Lucky for me, they have a 2-days-for-the-price-of-one deal if you pick up the rental between Monday and Wednesday.  That would put the cost at only $35 for a two-day rental of the cleaner and the attachment for upholstery and stairs.  I would also have to factor in the cost of buying a bottle of cleaning solution, and the cost of using my own hydro and water for the job.

Since I’m a stickler for doing things properly, I thought this would be a great time to combine this steam cleaning with “spring cleaning”, and decided that since I would be moving most of the furniture, I would also completely re-organize all of the closets, purge any unnecessary garbage, and find things we no longer use to get ready for a neighborhood yard sale.  This was certainly more work than just the steam cleaning, but since I had to remove much of it to clean out the carpeted closet floors, I thought the timing couldn’t be better.

We started with the second floor of the house, moved all of the furniture to the tiled areas, and brought all of the closet stuff downstairs for me to organize.  It was a lot of work to sort through everything, but it felt really good to completely de-clutter.  I have a very neat home, but even I can be accused of putting a few things into closets to deal with later.  One of the best things I had done was to completely go through my clothes: I’ve gained about 30lbs in the last 3 years, and many of my clothes didn’t fit quite right so I stopped wearing them, and it had been making me sad to look at them every time I opened the closet.  So I made 5 piles: Yard sale/donate, Garbage, Favourite skinny clothes (I’m in the process of getting back my old shape and weight), Needs to be mended or hemmed, and Stuff that fits.   Even though I didn’t need to completely get rid of all of it, just removing all of the stuff from my closet that I don’t wear right now made me feel much lighter and happier.  I completed a similar process for the office room and guest room closets that we had been using for extra storage.

Back to the steam cleaning:  The second floor and main stairs were the bulk of the carpets, and took me about 3 hours to do.  I have a couple of tips:  1. Buy the right amount of cleaning solution, thankfully I knew how many square feet we needed to do and bought the right-sized bottle, we used the mid-range of what they suggested and even have some solution left over.  2.  With the Rug Doctor machine I used (very similar to other brands), when you push the button, the cleaning and solution and water go in and some of the dirty water comes out–I discovered that if I did a second pass of the area without pushing the button, it continued to suck up the water from the carpet, thus pulling up much more of the dirty water and allowing the carpets to dry much sooner.  I mention this because it’s not in the instructions.  I had rented the upholstery attachment for $2 and it did a great job with the couple of hard-to reach places, and all facets of our spiral staircase.  We let everything dry for a good 24 hours (it felt dry much sooner than that), and then moved on to the main floor, which only took an hour since it’s mostly ceramic tile.  I also had more than enough cleaning solution to do some if the little rugs I have in the house.

Total including my estimate of $7 for hydro and water, $22 for the cleaning solution, $35 rental, and all taxes, I figure we spent about $70, saving $160 on this job.  I know that we had to move the furniture ourselves (took about 2 hours total for taking down and putting back), but I felt that it was completely worth it to know that everything got moved and that I got to couple this job with my spring cleaning.  If we’re lucky, I’m thinking that we can recoup the money spent with all of the stuff we now have ready for our neighbourhood street sale.  Even though it wasn’t pretty, it felt good to get rid of the buckets of dirty water from my home.

Here’s a quick summary of the pros and cons I could think of (that applied to my situation):

Pros

• Could do the job in 2 stages over 2 days since we were doing it ourselves
• Was able to combine the job with spring cleaning (would have had to pull things out of the closets twice otherwise)
• Saved $160 by doing it ourselves and didn’t have that much of an inconvenience since we did it over 2 days, then went camping on the last day while things were drying out
• Found a 2-for-1 deal since I rented it mid-week (many places offer this kind of a deal since they are only really busy with rentals on weekends)

Cons

• Steam cleaning project itself took about 6 hours of mostly my time including the cleaning, set-up, and take down
• Had to find a way to keep the nosy dogs (they’re good jumpers) barricaded out of the way
• Some people may think that this job is too dirty for them–I didn’t feel that way at all, I was happy to be cleaning up all of that hidden dirt–specially when I figured out how to remove the extra dirty water from the carpet.

Would I do it again?

Definitely.  It was totally worth it for me, not just for the steam cleaning, but for the spring cleaning I did, and finding stuff for the big yard sale.  For the future, I’m wondering about just buying one of the Bissell home steam cleaners, and also hoping that our future homes will have hardwood floors

Okay, that’s enough about the steam cleaning for now.  Don’t forget to enter the Great Galapagos Contest  and also read about my crazy personal finance challenge before you leave the site!

 Please subscribe to my feed if you enjoy the articles!

Category: Personal Finance | Tags: