A Brilliant Idea

So, I thought I would lighten things up in here a bit. I found this post that I wrote over the summer in my drafts. Which, surprisingly I have very few of. Anyway, this past summer I had no car and no camera as both were broken. Relevance to be explained.

Once in a while I have a moment. One that could be called genius. An idea so brilliant it is blinding. Blinding! You gotta' wear shades!

In the girls room, really ever since Teena was born, I have had an off -white rug on the floor. Maybe it is pale beige but you get the idea. It is probably a 5x8 and I can't remember how much it cost but I can rest easily estimating it at $30 or less. Because I would be most unlikely to spend more than that. It is a Berber type rug, the sort that Home Depot might run a special on, the kind of thing that they finish up with a nice edge, instead of disposing of it, and sell.

As one accustomed to children might imagine, off white, taupe, any color other than the color of dirt is not going to look nice for long. This little rug looked okay for a few years really but as one would expect it got dingier and dingier. Then, the little inhabitants (now 2 of them) of the bedroom containing the rug began the process of trying to get their little rear ends to the toilet. In time. And over the past 2 years, the 2 little inhabitants have had success in this endeavor if you define success with a wide presumption of learning the process and by learning I mean by failing a few times. Few, few dozen, thousand, whatever. And so this little rug has become well, infectious.

Now I would like to carry the recycled brown paper bag banner in the parade for the "Greenest Green Mom There Ever Was" because I have tried to save this rug. I am going to save this planet people, and I am going to save it one grimy crappy cheap carpet at a time. Do you want to know how many chemicals get dumped in the ocean from the procedures used in the manufacturing of cheap carpet? Find out and tell me because I have no clue.


Call me "Green", call me too cheap to buy another carpet, call me way too lazy to drag it out to the garbage. I had a brilliant idea. An idea so astounding, it blinded my own brain rendering me motionless, stunned for a moment by the evidence of such creative genius.

Dye the rug yellow. Dye it yellow to match the current pee stains on it and dye it yellow to mask future further pee stains. I will take all the control and all the mad out of the issue and dye their carpet to match their dysfunctional little behaviors!

Yes, yes indeed, I amaze myself sometimes. Really. Take a minute if you need to.

Hmm, how does one dye a cheap carpet? Dunno. I started by cleaning it viciously. Soaked it outside with hot water and anti- bacterial soap and beat the crap out of it. Quite frankly I was not sure it would survive the cleaning attack it received nor did I care. Good enough. I bought some of those little spray airbrush cans of fabric paint from a massive craft store. A yellow can of airbrush paint and since there was only one can of yellow at the store and even though it said it would cover 30 square feet I had my doubts so I bought a can of hot pink airbrush fabric paint as well.

The airbrush fabric paint worked in that it looked cool where the paint took. But since it didn't saturate it wound up looking like yellow goober on top of a stained carpet. The pink blended well with the yellow only with the same effect of pink goober stuff on top of a stained carpet. I know I went to public school, in Illinois no less, but I must have made a big fat mistake in my math somehow anyway because I quickly ran out of fancy airbrush fabric paint after about half the carpet had paint on it. Now it is halfway painted with colors that just sit there on top and don't sink in. Blotchy. 2 cans of 30 square feet should be 60 right? And the carpet was 5X8 which is 40? Is this not right? Well anyway. Moving along.

It occurs to me that this is not better than the original.

But I battle on. I decide to try to use a rit type fabric dye. Only it is hard to get to the store what with the broken car all summer and when I finally get to a store they don't have rit they have some other brand. Whatever. I bought it in Sunflower. Doesn't that sound like a pleasant addition to remake my greenie green green little rug? In yellow that is, not green.

But how am I going to rinse this dye business off, I thinks to myself? You have to pour the dye on, let it sit and then rinse it. You have to rinse, it says so on the label. Brilliant idea #2. Wait for rain. Put the dye on when the weather geniuses say it is going to rain, then let the natural rain rinse it! See, that was smart of me because I could not possibly put the carpet in the washing machine and you have to be able to rinse this dye stuff off or a bad toxic thing could happen. Using that natural rain stuff saves water!!! Green again!

No rain came.

Until yesterday (in July). Finally rain was predicted and looked promising. Mixed up my fancy Sunflower colored yellow dye and dumped it all over the carpet outside. Only now it looks like instead of 2 little girls, one gigantic elephant pee'd all over the carpet. Oh well, I decided, I will wait for the rain to rinse it off and then I will see how it turns out from there. Gotta be better than it is now!

Only by now, I have spent countless valuable hours that I could have spent enjoying my family or watching important tv shows, on this carpet. Dollars and dollars on paint and dye. Chemicals aplenty. And one local store had similar- but-definitely- cleaner rugs on clearance this week. For $26.

And evidently, fabric dye does not take to chopped up finished edge carpet remnants. It leaves a sort of dingy filmy color- though it did saturate under the airbrush fabric paint. Turned out that by "Sunflower", they meant similar in hue to a dried french mustard stain.

Sadly, along with my car over the summer my camera broke as well. So this is a picture from my cell phone, which is why I never put up this post in the first place. Techno- impediment. Could not get it out of the phone until now.




This is after the air brush paint, before the dye. Not so good.

(Now back to 2010).
After that, I put down a different carpet in the girls room. That one up there is in the back storage in our house. The one I put in their room curled up at the edges and we all tripped over it every day. Besides, Teena had already colored that one in with pink chapstick. So I put down some foam alphabet letters only those kept coming apart (mysteriously!). Then, I put down a large kitchen rug. Only recently someone had a supreme error in judgement and told a lie. In that lie was an involved story involving a turd and that carpet. So even though there was no visual evidence of the atrocity, I have to work under the assumption of guilt. In other words, if there is a chance there is poo dust on that carpet it has got to go.

Now, I have put my yoga mat down in the bedroom. Since I don't need it. Why have I made so much of an effort to keep a stupid rug on the floor in there? Well partly because someones husband went late in the sale and bought the girls a medium wood tone bunk bed because the pretty white ones were all sold out. Unfortunately the floor is also a medium tone wood. Ick. Looks like all kinds of nature threw up in there. It desperately needs a carpet of a non- wood tone to break up the visual something something.

The other reason is that Genea will go to sleep on the floor when she is really stressed. I can put her back in her bed 50 times and 51 times I will go check on her and she is back on the floor. So I don't want her to be directly on the cold wood! At least if she is going to sleep down there she should be a little comfortable. A little cushioned, a little more warm. That's why I have to have something down.