The Stain

The morning after my last post found me still snoring soundly by 10:30AM. The phone rang, startling me awake and I stumbled around to look at the clock and almost fainted. I'd set the alarm on my cell phone for 7:30 AM and it simply didn't go off. Stupid, stupid phone! I still had a whole room to paint and carpets to clean and a consultation to set up for and errands to run and the rental Rug Doctor was due back to the store by 1PM! So. I decide to cut my losses and headed out the door with the Rug Dr. and a handful of paperwork to run the rest of my errands.

Back home, errands complete. Dive into the painting. Alright, everything's okay. I'm thinking I can get it all done and have the room set back up before my 6PM appointment. It'll be tight, but I CAN do it! 3:45 rolls around and 3 out of 4 walls are painted. Only one wall left, but it's a doozie. Crimson colored paint on a light yellow wall. Gonna need 2 coats, minimum. Start getting set up and begin pulling off masking tape from the previous 3 walls. To my dismay, large chunks of fresh paint begin coming off with the tape. YIKES! Alright, minor set-back, I'll touch it up later. I mask the final wall and look at the clock. 4PM. I go to mix the dark red paint and in that instant the unthinkable occurs. Before my very eyes, there's suddenly, shockingly a half a gallon of crimson paint spreading in a dark pool across my carpet. The horror! The humanity! I stood there for a full 30 seconds, I'm sure, just staring helplessly. How can I possibly get this up? Towels, I thought. No. I don't have that many towels--there aren't THAT many towels in the whole world! It's too thick for towels, anyway. And it's too thin to be"picked up". So I ended up frantically scraping at it with a spatula and then as a last resort with my bare hands, trying to scoop it into a dust pan. I'd then fly into the bathroom and dump it down the drain and fly back to the spill and do it again. Eventually I looked down and realized that at some point in my scurrying, I'd stepped in some of the paint and tracked it all over. OH.GOOD. Bloody footprints to finish out that homicide-scene effect. When I had exhausted the scraping/scooping option, I called Melissa for advice. By this time, my house really did have the appearance of a crime scene. I really should've taken a picture! Anyhoo, she directed me to the WTM board. I posted my dilemma and learned from "the hive mind" that keeping the spot damp and then woking it over extensively with a shop vac is the only possible hope. Not being a shop vac owner, I was preparing for a harried flight to Lowe's, when my phone rang and my consultation appointment postponed for the day. Normally, I would be very disappointed by this, as I always need the work. Today I did a small but sincere dance of joy. Now, I had until the next morning to get the house back together.

The carpet spot cleaner I had poured on the stain needed some time to work, so I got busy and finished the first coat on the final wall before I ran out of paint. I was about to jump in the shower and wash off the worst of the blood-like smudges coating my body, when I had the great misfortune of answering my phone. It was a girl who lives down the street, whom I barely know.Who decided to share her sad, sad life's story with me (I get that alot, for some reason). The tale that followed was a redneck soap opera of abusive boyfriends (the last of whom she's still shacked-up with), illegitimate children, drugs and poverty. Very disturbing. Not one of those conversations where you can easily make an excuse and get off of the phone. So I sat there and said "uh-huh"and "oh,man" at all the right intervals and watched the stain on my carpet set-in. When I finally got off the phone, it was after 8PM. I showered and headed out the door just in time to see teenage-neighbor-boy from down the road approaching my doorstep.The dogs, who had been securely locked away in the office, hearing a strange voice, somehow broke free of their confinement and proceeded to tramp all through the stain and run all over the house confusedly, amid my shouts of "NO! DON'T STEP THERE! GET OFF THAT! COME HERE! NO! NOT THAT WAY!MOVE! MOVE! NO! STOP! STAY!" After helping me wrangle the dogs, teenage-neighbor-boy said that he had a shop vac and ran home to get it. 15 minutes later he arrived, vac in hand. We set it up and plugged it in and turned it on and dirt and ashes flew EVERYWHERE! He said that he had another vac at his house that was newer and he just KNEW it would work(I think he was feeling bad about the dirt and ashes). SO, to save time I drove him home and after some searching through a shed full of junk we found a non-functioning Rainbow. His mom, after hearing my sad spill story, was kind enough to lend me her small carpet cleaner. I took it home set it up and gave it a try and it immediately SPREAD the stain to another third larger than it's original size. And coated the inside of the poor woman's steam cleaner with rasberry colored goo. So, I sent the cleaner home with teenage-neighbor-boy, who promised to get the rasberry mess out of it for me, and I headed to Walmart--open 24/7! :0)
I was back home by about 12AM and went to work. The only plug close enough to The Stain, decided to be tempermenal and kept clicking the shop vac on and off every time I moved it. So, I unscrewed the plate and in prying it off the wall it broke into 6 pieces and took giant hunks of my freshly painted wall with it. GOOD. After fiddling with it for a while the plug began to work properly and I set to scrubbing. The first couple of tries were disppointingly fruitless. I eventually found a method using pitcher's full of bleach water and carpet cleaner that started to do the trick. At about 1:30AM I was making real progress, despite the fact that I had to get up and empty the shop vac about every 90 seconds and refill the pitcher. Imagine my utter discouragement when I felt dampness on my leg and turned around from my cramped hands and knees poisition to see an enormous pool of what loked like ultra-concentrated, rasberry Crystal Light on the carpet around the shop vac barrel and sprayed onto my newly painted wall. Apparently the shop vac had malfunctioned and sprayed the last batch of paint water it'd been collecting ALL.OVER.THE PLACE. The carpet stain was now about twice the size it had been when I started scrubbing. And it was on the wall. And all over my pants leg.
I took a 5 minute break to collect myself and started all over again. I finally fell into bed (the futon, still coverless and crammed into the kitchen) sometime between 3-4AM. My consultation for the next morning was at 10AM and I had a REAL alarm clock set for 7:30. The stain was still there, but no longer looked quite so much like the sight of a murder investigation. The giant dark spot was mostly pink now and could be partially, temporarily covered by furniture. The furniture was still half in the yard and half scattered around the house, but I was just too tired to mess with it.
When I awoke the next morning, painfully bright and early, I rolled over and screamed as a fiery crick shot up my neck and paralyzed me for about 10 minutes. The dull pain in my lower back I was able to just ignore. When the crick finally wore off I got up and got ready. I had to wear long pants, because apparently the combination of bleach and carpet cleaner produces a compound which eats human flesh--there were raw spots on my shins and knees. I put the house back together and had my consultation and it went surprisingly well (later in the week, the lady called and booked the wedding with me--apparently the bloody carpet and my haggard appearance didn't put her off--go figure!).

The next few days were spent moving furniture, scrubbing The Stain and moving furniture again and scrubbing some more. It's finally gone.

I think that the moral of this story might be this:

If you ever spill paint on your carpet, don't panic. Just gather your most precious belongings and put them in a safe place and then burn your house down.

Trust me. It' s just easier.

:0)