LESLIE: Alicia in Alabama, you’ve got The Money Pit. What can we do for you today?
ALICIA: Yes, we have a sunroom with commercial carpet that some paint got spilled on the carpet. It’s a big glob about eight inches.
TOM: OK.
ALICIA: And I was wondering if there’s any way of getting this blob that dried hard or if you can paint commercial carpet.
TOM: Make it all match, huh? (laughs)
ALICIA: Make it all match, yes.
LESLIE: Is moving a piece of furniture over that stain completely out of the question?
TOM: Yeah, as is a throw rug? (Leslie chuckles)
ALICIA: Well, I’ve got a rug over it now.
TOM: Yeah.
ALICIA: But it is kind of in the middle of the room where …
TOM: Yeah.
ALICIA: … I ordinarily wouldn’t have a rug there.
TOM: Do you happen to have an area of this carpet that maybe is in a closet or a place where you could cut out a piece and use that to patch in the area that’s stained?
ALICIA: No, we don’t.
TOM: Yeah. Well, I can’t – we can’t honestly recommend painting carpet. I think that when you buy paint, you know, carpet is not one of the things that are listed as it being qualified to cover.
LESLIE: Now is the carpet a light – describe the color of the paint and the color of the carpet.
ALICIA: The paint is a light beige and the carpet is blue.
LESLIE: Hmm.
TOM: Well, you can dye carpet but you can’t paint carpet.
LESLIE: Yeah, you can dye carpet but generally if it’s a lighter color going darker. And you’ve got a light-color paint on there with a deepish-tone carpet, so there’s really nowhere for you to go. There’s a good website that has carpet dyes and it’s AmericolorDyes.com. But they might not be able to take you from a darker color, especially with a light stain on it and obviously the paint’s been there for some time.
An option is – there’s a company called Flor Carpet Tiles. F-l-o-r is how they spell it. You can search them online. And they sell carpet tiles that are sort of 20-inch square and you just piece them together and they do a full line of exterior carpets -you know, for a covered porch or any sort of area that’s kind of screened in – and you might be able to do an overlay to make it look like an area rug or at least just pull that out and start from scratch and then you’re in a situation where if you spill something again you can just pop out that one tile and put something down; a new one.
ALICIA: Alright. Well, thank you very much.
TOM: You’re welcome, Alicia. Thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT and buy a dropcloth next time, will you? (Leslie chuckles) Just so much better.
LESLIE: I’m telling you, that one time – I forget what we were doing. Oh, I know. We did the living room makeover and of course, being me, I made Ed and I do the entire makeover in one day; all the sewing, all the painting, all the moving the furniture back in. And you know, 11:00 at night we put the can of white trim paint on the top shelf in the garage, closed the garage door and we hear like BAM, CLANG, CLANG. (Tom chuckles) And we open up the garage door and the white can of paint has fallen on the floor and has completely spilled everywhere.
TOM: Well at least it was the garage.
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