I love my Cooper so much. He’s a 100-pound bundle of energy and anxiety. He sheds about the equivalent of a chihuahua every week. He scratches my floors because he won’t let me touch his feet (even the vet couldn’t cut his claws without him being under anesthesia). And he makes a mess of my rugs. But he also makes me laugh every single day, protects me like his life depends on it, and makes me feel incredibly safe.

But it’s the rug and carpet situation I needed to take care of yesterday because when they start looking dingy and filthy, that also means they smell like dirty dog. And it’s impossible for the house to look and feel clean if the rugs look dirty.

When the rug in the living room is in need of cleaning, it starts to look dull in places, as if the color has faded from it.

But Cooper likes to sleep over by the window sometimes, so this area also starts to look dark and dirty after about three months.

You can see the difference it makes below. I started cleaning from left to right. Look how well it removes the dirt and brightens those colors back up!

And here it is all clean.

Just look at this side-by-side comparison!

I emptied this thing about five times just to clean this one rug. Look at what was hiding in this rug. So gross.

The rug in the sitting room is the worst because this is where Cooper sleeps every night. He has free run of the house at night because his job is to keep our house safe. So he starts off every night in the home gym, and then during the night, he comes into the sitting room to sleep. Can you tell what spot he sleeps on? 😀

I have to admit that I love cleaning things that are really dirty. There’s so much satisfaction in being able to see a big difference between the before and after.

Again, gross. I think I removed about six of these from this rug. It’s a smaller rug, but it was quite a bit dirtier than the living room rug.

And here it is all clean. Cooper’s wondering what happened to his “bed”. 😀

This was my first time to use my Bissell in the home gym, but I was excited to try it out. When I put these black carpet tiles in the home gym, my plan was to keep the door closed to keep Cooper and Felicity (our cat) out of the room at all times. But Cooper LOVES this room, and it makes my heart happy to see him happy. He runs in here and skids across the carpet, and he loves to run, jump, twirl, and play in this room. I just don’t have the heart to kick him out. But he makes an absolute disaster of the back carpet.

I’m so glad I did because it made a HUGE difference! I didn’t realize how dull the carpet had become until I began using the carpet cleaner on it, starting with the long entry into the room. Just look at the difference! I had forgotten how dark the [clean] carpet tiles are!

You can really see the difference here. The angle cutting between Matt’s exercise bike and the rebounder isn’t a shadow. That’s the difference between the vacuumed carpet and the carpet cleaned with the Bissell.

And here it is after it was cleaned with the Bissell.

It makes such a difference not only in how clean the actual rugs and carpet look, but it also makes the house smell so clean and fresh. It’s hard to get that clean, fresh smell in the house when everything except the carpets are clean. And Felicity approves. I came into the kitchen this morning and found her lounging about on the freshly cleaned living room carpet.