While a life without pets is, for many of us, a life not worth contemplating, it does have a few drawbacks. One of the most noticeable is the heavy sprinkling of “dog (or cat) glitter” you carry on all of your clothing unless your fur friend is one of the few hairless breeds. Should you have friends over, even the pet-free ones will leave with a little “glitter” of their own thanks to the stuff caught in your upholstered furniture and in your rugs.
Even if you vacuum every day, chances are there’s a lot more pet hair in your carpeting than you ever dreamed possible. Once the hair gets deep down in those carpet fibers, only a super-strong vacuum has a hope of sucking it out again, and those tend to be pretty budget-breaking. Rather than having to cut back on pet treats, though, one TikTok user suggests you can pull up even the most deeply embedded carpet gunk with something that’s far less expensive than even the cheapest vacuum cleaner.
A simple squeegee will do the trick
The TikTok video shows how to deep clean and fluff up a carpet “wayyy more than a hoover can.” The uploader said she bought a cheap squeegee -– hers came from Ikea, where one will likely run you no more than a buck or two — and just pulled it backwards (against the pile) over the carpet. The result? A “huuuuge color difference” and a surprisingly large pile of dust that the vacuum cleaner had missed.
As with so many TikTok hacks, however, the video creator wasn’t the first to come up with this idea. As the Amazon reviews on this long-handled rubber brush/squeegee combo indicate, people have been onto the idea of carpet squeegeeing for a number of years already.
One Reddit thread from last year discussed carpet squeegees at length. Unlike the TikToker, most of the Redditors posting did seem to have pets so they were specifically discussing how much pet hair (as opposed to dust) the squeegee hack might remove. Results were mixed: those with more powerful vacuums and/or less hairy dogs didn’t seem to find that squeegeeing did much for their carpeting, while others thought it worked wonders. Still, for the price of a squeegee, it’s probably worth trying –- and, as the owner of a hairy husky/shepherd mix discovered, even though squeegeeing hasn’t helped their carpets one bit, “it does wonders for our couch and chairs.”
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