I tend to keep Borax around. I use it as a detergent booster and to clean the toilets. I decided it was time to try Borax as a carpet stain remover! We had 4 stains in our big family room. We moved into this house only 5 months ago. The most irritating part about the stains is that my husband, me, and our dog did not cause any of the stains. Crazy, right? They all appeared after having friends and family over various times. (Now when we host events, no matter how few people, NO ONE is allowed to have food or drink over carpet.) But that means that by the time we learned about the stains, they were pretty set in. One of the stains looked like our dog peed on the carpet and we never cleaned it up. I’m sure you can guess how I, writer for an organization and cleaning blog, felt about being asked that question. It was embarrassing, and it was time to do something. We don’t have a carpet cleaner. This was the first time of attempting to clean the stains, so you see the progression of set in and never dealt with to treated once and treated twice. Stain 1 was dark to start, but small. My toes are in a lot of the pictures to show you relative size. 
As you can see, the color lightened a lot and it lifted a good amount. Stain 2 was the one that looked like dog urine. It was a lighter color than all the other stains. 
It didn’t fade much. I really wonder what this stain was from so I can treat it appropriately. Third stain was a right angle and we have no idea what it was from. 
By the second treatment, the stain was pretty much gone! Stain 4 part 1. 
Pretty much gone!! Stain 4 part 2 had a lot of little dark spots and a big lighter circle. 
It faded a lot by the first treatment, but I went ahead and treated again and the color from the carpet got removed for some reason. It’s not obvious though and I’ll take it! 
The carpet cleaner was super easy to make. I got my cleaning recipe and directions from this page. 1/2 cup Borax added to 2 cups of warm water. I mixed it up pretty good with a fork and for the second treatment, I dug into the bowl and really made sure I got some Borax on my rag instead of just water.
- Take the Borax/water mixture and blot onto stain using a white towel. Do not soak the carpet!
- Let sit for half an hour. (Make sure to keep pets or kids out of the area!)
- Using a new white towel and plain cold water, sponge area to remove cleaning solution. Again, do not soak the carpet! Blot dry.
- Let dry (I let it sit overnight – our dog is shut in the room with us at night). When completely dry, vacuum.
I repeated the steps twice over two days. I am pleased with the results! How do you clean up food/drink stains on your carpet?
For the Love of Organization 