No excuse...

The thing with having plenty of time is that there's no excuse to put off the things that you haven't done because you have been too busy. I've been thinking about cleaning the living room carpet for ages; but thinking about it was as far as it got. Having a beige flat pile carpet is great in many ways, but when it comes to those frequent traffic areas - well, it ends up looking like a beige carpet with not so beige pathways dotted around the coffee table. Of course our love of open fires doesn't help, nor the dripping wax from the candles, and then there's the red wine...

Today I decided to man up and get the carpet cleaned. Of course I could have called a carpet cleaning company, but with time to do it that didn't seem right and besides, a man has to do what a man has to do.

As a child my mother would take our living room carpet outside and scrub it in the sunshine on the front lawn. She used 1001 carpet cleaner which, as the television ad jingled, 'cleaned a big, big carpet for less than half-a-crown'. Today wasn't sunny and of course our carpets are fitted, but that didn't stop me from using the 'old ways' to get our carpet spick and span.

Yes, no carpet cleaning machine for me. I plumped for spray foam from cans, a good stiff broom and our electric steam mop. My reason for doing this was that I couldn't be arsed to go to Tesco's, hire the machine, and then bump into furniture as I moved the unwieldy device around the floor. Spray cans and my trusty steam mop were far more flexible and, with the addition of a tough stain spray diffuser, a scrubbing brush and plenty of elbow grease and grooans, the carpet was brilliantly clean in a couple of hours.

A job well done, even if I say so myself and for less than a tenner. One thing though. I found myself whistling the 1001 jingle as I cleaned, and that hasn't been on TV since the sixties. Funny how these thing stick.