Carpets are an excellent way to spruce up any room. However, they can be difficult to clean and maintain. The stairway is one of the areas that is often overlooked when it comes to the cleaning routine.

Luckily, there are many different ways you can maintain your carpet so that it stays looking its best.

Step 1

• Stiff Brush – This loosens any hardened debris and dirt on the stairs

The first step to cleaning carpeted stairs is to remove any stubborn dirt and debris that is deep into the carpet and won’t come off with regular vacuuming. A good way to do this is with a brush that has stiff bristles. If you don’t have a good brush, then you can use an attachment to your vacuum cleaner that helps get rid of dirt.

Step 2

• Vacuum – Use a powerful cordless vacuum and suck up the dirt from the carpet

Once the excess dirt on the carpet has been taken care of, vacuum it one more time with your favorite type of vacuum cleaner. Focus on staircases though – to make the process easier, you should use a vacuum cleaner that’s designed for stairs..

The  best vacuum for stairs is a  battery operated vacuum or a lightweight one with an extended power cord. One of the most popular choices is Shark Duoclean Lift-Away (link to Amazon). The last thing you want to be doing is trying to balance while holding a vacuum to the top of a staircase while it pulls you down.

Step 3

• Shampoo –

Next, scrub those stairs to make them really clean by spraying on the carpet shampoo. If you only have a few carpets on your stairs, you could probably scrub them with your hands.

Alternatively, you could get a carpet cleaner to clean your stairs. These usually need a lot of space and often have attachments to help them reach different parts of the surface. If you don’t have a carpet cleaner, it’s easy to rent one from supermarkets or hardware shops. Just make sure the machine is correctly equipped for your staircase.

Step 4

• Dry the Stairs –

After shampooing your stairs they will have a lot of excess water on them unless you used a carpet cleaner that sucks up the water as it cleans.

There’s a good chance that if you leave the water in your carpet, it will take days to dry naturally. If you do this, mold and bacteria can grow in your carpet. The quicker you remove as much water as possible then the better.

Step 5

• Final Vacuum

Once you have gotten rid of most of the water on the carpeted stairs, leave them to dry naturally. This will take several hours or overnight, but it’s worth it in the end!  When the stairs are completely dry, give them a final vacuum to freshen the carpet and remove any debris from your cleaning job. You should now have a clean-looking staircase!

How to Protect Carpeted Stairs and Prevent Future Damage

The best thing you can do to clean carpet stairs is by vacuuming them daily or as much as possible.  Vacuuming regularly keeps dirt & dust from getting packed deep into the carpet fibers.