How Can I Clean up Paint That Fell on My Carpet?

When painting, many people are well aware of the fact that you will need to cover just about every surface in the area you are painting aside from the places where you actually want new paint to be. Painting can get incredibly messy, especially if you are not used to it or if you are painting for a long time. Even if you do your best to make sure that you don’t spill paint anywhere that you don’t want it to be, accidents can and will happen. If you finish painting only to realize that your carpet is now a brand-new color, you may not know what to do. After all, you don’t want to rub the stain in and make it impossible to get out of the fabric, but doing nothing isn’t going to solve the problem either. Cleaning paint up from your carpet will depend on a few factors, namely what you have available to clean the carpet with and what type of paint you spilled. 

Removing Paint From the Carpet

Nobody wants paint on their carpet. The unwanted, mess splotch of color that doesn’t match the rest of the floor can quickly become an eyesore that nobody wants to deal with. Thankfully, there are a few different ways you can remove the paint from your carpet. First things first, you are going to want to gather the materials needed to remove the paint. You will want to have a plethora of clean rags or towels, a mild dish detergent, a carpet stain remover, a table knife, and a steamer if the paint has already dried. 

You will want to take action to clean up the paint spill as soon as you notice that it is there. The faster you can get around to cleaning it, the less time the paint will have to soak deeply into the fibers of the carpet and turn into a permanent stain. Wet paint is much, much easier to clean up without a remaining stain than dried paint is. When you first see that stain, you will want to take paper towels and blot out as much of the excess paint as you can take away from the carpet. Do not scrub the carpet, as this will only rub the stain in. 

Once the bulk of the paint has been blotted away, you should take some dish soap and some warm water to a clean rag to continue blotting the stain with. This combination will help remove the bits of paint that may have begun to stick to the carpet fibers. When doing this, you should work from the outside of the stain inward. You should continue doing this until the stain is gone or you have no patience to do it anymore. 

If the dish detergent isn’t working, you should turn to commercial stain removing products. The way that these are applied depend on the product itself and you should turn to the instructions of that product for how you should use it. This should work, as these stain removers are pretty powerful. 

What About Dried Paint? 

If you noticed the paint a bit too late and it has already dried, you won’t have to worry. Removing dried paint is still pretty easy. First things first, you should take a table knife to the paint stain and try and remove as much of the paint as you can without destroying the carpet itself. (This is why you use a table or butter knife, as it has an edge to it, but not one that can easily damage carpet fibers.) Once the excess paint has been scraped away, you will want to begin mixing a solution of dish detergent and water. Rather than blotting the dried stain, you can simply pour the solution onto the stain so that it can soften and soak the stain. From here, the process is the same as removing wet paint, as the paint should be moistened at this point.