Carpeted floors are great home features especially if you have a hyperactive toddler who might get a bad head injury falling on a concrete or wooden floor. On the other hand, small children can spill liquid, wipe their dirty hands, or do anything on your carpets that will make carpet cleaning a nightmare.

The good news is that you can actually clean up carpet stains with many everyday household products! We’d like to share with you some practical cleaning tips you can try out the next time an accident happens, and really will just use products that are common in every home. Let’s look at 3 of the most well known and useful cleaning tips.

1. To make a general stain remover solution, mix together water with a dish washing soap of your choice that is free of bleach and alkaline chemicals. (Otherwise you run the risk of discoloring the carpet.) Blot the stained carpeted area with the solution and then rub it with a brush. Wipe off any extra solution with a towel. This will remove many different types of stains.

2. If you have bleach stains on the carpet, a practical carpet cleaning tip is to use the same solution described above but use it a little differently. This time blot the stain using a dry cloth and then leave it for 10 minutes. Return and repeat, over and over, until the bleach spot is entirely gone. Be sure to start from the outside of the stain and work inward. Once removed, blot with cold water and then wipe clean with a separate dry cloth.

3. One of the worst carpet cleaning jobs comes from chewing gum that’s somehow ended up on the carpet. While this is no fun to remove, it’s not out of our reach. First remove what you can using a brush or small tool. Then take a few ice cubes and put them in a plastic bag. Hold this against the gum to freeze it. Once it’s frozen, take a spatula and scrape off the gum. Then using the mixture described in tip number one, blot the area repeatedly. This will remove small traces of the gum.