Your home's carpeting provides comfortable, soft, and warm flooring for you and your family, but to your pets it can often become their toilet. Instead of tearing out the carpet in your home to replace it with a solid surface flooring, you can use several methods to clean up the stains and odors caused from their accidents. Here are some tips to help you keep your carpets clean and stain-free from pet accidents.

Visible Urine Stains

One of the problems that occurs when a dog or cat pees on your carpeting is the visible stain the urine can leave in your carpeting. Over time, these spots can turn your flooring into ta pee-stain polka-dot surface that you may not want to walk across with your bare feet. When your pet has accidents on the carpeting, you may not always catch them freshly-made to you can clean them up and they can dry and set within the carpet's fibers leaving a stain.

To remove a stain, first, sprinkle baking soda onto the stain to cover all the fibers with the soda. Next, combine water in a spray bottle with a squirt of Dawn dish soap and some white vinegar. Spray this onto the baking soda-covered stain. Use a scrub brush to work the mixture into the fibers of the carpeting. After the spot dries, vacuum up the baking soda and the stain should be gone. Repeat this, when necessary.

Cat Urine Odors

Cat urine is one of the worst smells to have in your house, and when your cat has urinated in areas that have gone unnoticed, the smell can intensify after it has dried. First, always try to clean up a urine spot while it is still wet. Blot up as much of the urine with a towel or cloth, pressing into the carpeting with your entire body weight. You can extract the urine with a shop vac or a carpet cleaner, but avoid using any steam or heat during the extraction, as this can set the urine stain and its smell into the carpet.

Next, spray the area with an enzyme-based urine floor cleaning solution. You can find this in the cleaning aisle and pet aisle of most local grocery stores and home improvement stores. Enzyme cleaners have actual enzymes in them that break down the protein in the urine that causes the odor. Spray this cleaner onto the urine spot and slightly around its edges to ensure you get all the underlying urine. Spray the cleaner in an area approximately twice the size of the original spot. Allow the cleaner to air dry.