How I Cleaned my Blinds without sneezing

The house clean up continues. Our new house has three bedrooms we're not using as bedrooms right now. Almost every time I'd go in one of those rooms (or even in the girls' room) I'd end up sneezing. There was a lot of dust. I've been trying to clean up the dust a bit at a time. Fly Lady's duster has been quite handy. All of the bedroom window coverings were gross with thick dust. I decided to wash them in the bath tub. I haven't tried washing the roman shades in our room yet, they might be too far gone. But I washed all of the blinds from the other rooms. Some were thick plastic molded to look like wood. A couple were painted metal. I washed all the same way. Run some hot water in the bath tub, add old laundry detergent (the new machine needs HE detergent), then put the blinds in. Don't pull them up, leave them extended to make cleaning easier. All the blinds weren't too hard to get down. Although there were two different kinds, both snapped out of the hardware which stayed attached to the wall. I only washed one at a time since one fills the tub and doing it over several days avoided burn out. I let the blinds soak for a few hours then usually because it was bath time for the girls, I'd hurry and wash each slat front and back with a rag. I'm not going to lie, it takes some time and work, but it got the blinds totally clean and with no sneezing. The blinds look like new and I'm happy!

Cleaning the Carpets- Rug Doctor

Our carpets were pretty gross and they smelled weird. They needed a cleaning. My dilemma was how best to go about getting them clean. I decided that it needed to get done and that I wasn't going to get around to finding a professional to do it quickly enough. My choices were down to renting a carpet cleaner or buying one.
After consulting with my husband, we decided that getting a smallish home carpet cleaner could be a good idea, but that since I needed to clean all the carpets right now, I'd rent a rug doctor. The downside to renting a carpet cleaner is that they aren't always all that clean. People return them all dirty and gross. The one I rented was absolutely covered with white fur on the bottom. I had to clean the cleaner before I could get started. It ended up being about $40 to rent the cleaner for 24hrs and to buy a medium sized bottle of cleaning solution. After moving almost all of the furniture out and vacuuming (I think a lot of people forget that step, thus the super dirty carpet cleaners) I cleaned the carpet. I had to refill the tank many, many times. I also went back over the whole carpet with just hot water.

I learned from having a little carpet cleaner in the past that the solution left over in the carpet quickly attracts dirt. The carpet looks a lot better, but you can still tell where the previous owners' sectional used to be. Perhaps the pros could have done a better job getting those old traffic stains out (I didn't use a pre-treatment either) but at least it is not totally gross any more. It was tiring work and took quite a while. I also vacuumed and cleaned the upstairs hallway. That required far less furniture moving! The carpet is still navy blue, but at least it no longer looks brown in spots, nor does it smell like dog any more. My sweet husband, determined to get the max value out of our rental, took up the effort after I tired out.

The family room before, complete with dancing kiddo.

He cleaned the living room carpet and the carpet in the master bedroom. In the end we got pretty much all the carpet in the house cleaned.

The family room after. I guess I didn't get any pictures of the blue carpets.