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Removing white glue from carpet

Submitted by K.Cunningham

I was once working on a project and had a jar of decoupage glue open on the table. One bump had the jar on the carpet, with a good portion of the glue now on the carpet. After the initial panic (I'm a renter, and I could just see my deposit disappearing before my eyes), I got down to business.

First, I grabbed a thin plastic spatula (the kind you scrape a cake bowl with, not the egg-fliping kind) and scraping from sides to center, collected as much as I could. Because my carpet had just been vacuumed, the glue was ok to put back in the jar, but you can throw it out if you need to. Once the excess was cleaned up, I just had to deal with the stain, and the stiffness I could already feel forming in the fibers.

What I did next was to saturate the carpet in that area with lukewarm water, then sprinkled a bit of baking soda over it. The one thing most people will say NOT to do when dealing with a stain is saturate the carpet, as it might spread the stain, and the moisture can be diffcult to remove. However, in a case like this, you really need to, as it dilutes the glue, robbing it of it's stiffening qualities.

White glue doesn't really leave a conventional stain, as it's colorless, but the stiffness left behind can be worse.

I let the baking soda sit for just 2 or 3 minutes, then got a clean kitchen sponge (don't use one that has a bacteria smell to it, use a fresh one, and throw it out afterward) and carefully worked the baking soda into the stain, just lightly dragging the sponge over the area ... it is not necessary to press hard at all, just a very gentle pressure is enough. Once this is done (not sure why baking soda works, but it helped prevent the stiffness issue) I simply blotted, rinsed, and blotted.

I then used a hair dryer on low heat to combat some of the moisture I'd put into the carpet. use the hairdryer in a larger area than the original stain, as the water spreads underneath it. This was 3 months ago, and to this day, there isnt' a hint of stiffness in the area, and it never smelled of damp or mildew.

The key is to dilute it before it begins to dry, and just the sprinkle of baking soda seems to release stiffness. If your glue leaves behind an unpleasant smell (some might react to the baking soda to create an odor) a half&half mix of cool water and lemon juice can be spritzed on the area very lightly (after it has been dried from the initial cleaning) and left to air dry. Or use a commercial carpet freshener, and vacuum.