Removing Gum from Carpet

Christopher Meyers: Hi! This is Christopher Meyers from Christophers in Merrifield, Virginia, and today we are going to talk about how to remove chewing gum from carpet.

So, I happened to have here a piece of well-chewed bubblegum that I am going to place on this carpeting such as this carpet sample around that I am going to press it in pretty hard. Thats pretty good.

So, to remove bubblegum, first you are going to use the rounded edge of your spoon as we have done in other segments and you are going to remove as what you can. Now, what to be cautious of here is you dont want to pull the fibers away from the carpeting with the gum itself. So, if the gum is not releasing easily thats time to we can go ahead with the procedure, but you wouldnt want to continue with scraping it up with the spoon or you could always call a professional at that point.

So, the point is up little bit at a time, and some of it is down there pretty good, so this is a good test case to show the procedure for getting the gum out of the carpeting.

So, I am getting this out. Again, being very careful here, to pull as few fibers as possible out of the carpeting. I am actually pressing down and then pulling on the gum itself, so I am not pulling the fibers out. The reason that you do that is because you could easily create a fuzzy spot on your carpet that will just not look very nice. So, a lot of we have taken away, and the next thing I am going to need is a little -- you could use a small screwdriver like the end its on one of the pocket knife type screwdriver thing, and an ice cube and with the ice cube we are just going to hold the ice cube, and in this case I put the ice cube inside of a food handling glove and I just took an ice cube and stuck it inside the glove, because we dont want to add water to the carpet since we have two spots.

So, we use the ice cube here, and we are just holding it against the gum and the reason that you use an ice cube is just because it hardens the gum and it makes it a little bit easier to work with, and I am using this little knife screwdriver here to apply away the gum from this looped pile carpet as much as I can, again without pulling too many fibers. So, you probably have to pull some, unless you are really, really lucky.

Now, so we have got it to here, its looking good, much better than it was at the beginning. So, this is where you take the small scissors and you want to just clip that right off of there, and you want to keep it flat, close to the top of the carpet. Like such and we have got just about all of it out. You can see there, there is just a few little pieces in here. We can actually use the scissor blade just to cut this out. Lets put them on the towel there. It looks good. Here at the end stages take some time to remove all little pieces that you can. It looks good.

Now, as a final step, because gum has sugar, dried sugar attracts soil, so we are going to apply some detergent on to the spot as we have done before, you want a detergent that is again specifically made for your type of carpet or rug. We are going to blot with a clean white absorbent towel and we are just going to blot, and each time you blot you move to a different spot to a nice dry spot of your towel and work across until you finish the entire spot, then it looks pretty good there.

Now, what the detergent will do is help break down the sugar or remove that substance when we blot. Now, if the carpet pile in this case is a looped pile its pressed down, you are going to use the rounded edge of a spoon and you are going to dress the fibers, in other words, place them back into an upright position so they look like the rest of the field out here, the area where we did not do our spot cleaning procedure. So, that blends nicely and you will probably forget where this gum spot was by the end of the day.

So, we are dressing up these fibers, so there you have, it looks great, but, to continue with this, to make sure this absolutely is best job as we can possibly do we are going to place not this one, but another clean white absorbent towel on top of this and then place a heavy book or something heavy on it so it provides uniform downward pressure just to help wick anything else that might be in there or anymore detergent thats left in the carpet will help wick that into the towel and thereby completing the spot cleaning procedure for gum from carpeting.