Hire Me
How did the Rug Doctor go? Let me tell you, I’ve only just recovered from it. That thing sent me to bed for two days, and a week later I’ve still no way of answering the question: “Your carpet is clean. But at what cost?”
Things could have gone so much better for me, but circumstances were out of my control. The first thing you should know about hiring a do-it-yourself carpet cleaner is that you must book it in advance, for four or eight hours. This is no casual thing. You need to stump up a refundable bond on top of the rental, as you must return this appliance in pristine condition, plus buy the lotion that goes with it.
In return you’re presented with a boxy red, black and white device in tough plastic, which pulls along on two wheels. It is plastered with insistent commands and lofty promises.
You’ll also receive a bulky tote bag containing a hand-held attachment for cleaning upholstery. You’ll clank out of Karori Mall with all these items looking like somebody with urgent business to attend to, as indeed you have. The clock is already ticking, and you haven’t even heaved it into your boot.
How naive I was, not to have checked the weather forecast that day! But that said, living in Wellington, who can possibly trust MetService? Bless them, they might as well be shuffling tarot cards up there as they monitor conditions at the highest point in Kelburn, their headquarters either shrouded in mist or slammed by gales eight months of the year. They can see a southerly storm rolling in and alert us in reasonable time, but their summer predictions have been, let’s say, an exercise in futility. PRETTY GOOD, the app might say, under the section marked Your Commute. What does that even mean? Likewise, CHANCE OF RAIN. You might as well just look out the window.
So that morning, I did. It was still summer, wasn’t it? There had been blazing sun the previous day. The following day was also forecast fine. But on this day, the day of my date with Doctor Rug, the forecast peak temperature was tepid. It was barely going to break fifteen degrees and Karori was cloaked in mist, which would take hours to disperse.
I was doomed.
The first thing I noticed was how heavy it was. Getting it to the car was a workout and lugging it into the back was a challenge. Put it this way: don’t wear low-rise jeans.
A family friend happened to be parked beside me, loading her sweet-faced little boy into his pushchair. She mentioned she had weighed up her options when it came to cleaning her couch and carpets — something she had put off until her mother-in-law was due to stay — and ultimately called in a professional service. They were done in four hours, with pleasing results. I shut the boot and began to feel the first clammy fingers of regret closing around my heart.
Clunking that unit up our few front steps was annoying and difficult. But it was inside, and I simply needed to follow the instructions (add detergent! Add hot water to the specified maximum level! Switch to ON! Pull unit along, do not push it, and ensure you overlap slightly the strip you’ve just cleaned, but not too much or you’ll saturate the carpet!).
The instruction I was most looking forward to was: Empty the dirty water! This was the Holy Grail of carpet cleaning — the moment of purge, where your filthy human leavings are bucketed down the sink. Then you sit around for two to four hours afterwards — I imagined myself doing this, with a family pack of chocolate almonds and a trashy book about the Kennedys — and wait for the furnishings to dry out, with all the windows open to the sun.
Bitter laugh!
I’d performed due diligence in advance by watching instructional YouTube videos explaining how to use and clean the appliance. These are performed by a strangely serene young woman in featureless surroundings. Weirdly, these might have been recorded yesterday or somewhere in the mid-nineties. She’s wearing skinny jeans, which have come around again at least three times since I was at university, and there’s absolutely no clue in her hairstyle, make-up or choice of shoe to locate her moment in time.
I found myself distracted by this.
What I should have been doing is clearing the rooms I wanted to clean of all furniture. I had not done this, and I had TWO downstairs rooms in mind — the living room, which features two large sofas, and a sitting room off the dining room which smells relentlessly of dog.
I also wanted to whip around the bedrooms if I could, and deep-clean both sofas, which are so pillowy they routinely swallow up household items. I vacuum under the cushions every week but still manage to find long lost things such as an asthma inhaler, guitar picks, spectacles in their case, paperbacks and cutlery.
How deluded can you be?
First, I hadn’t anticipated moving all that furniture on my own. I’d forgotten to rope in the family, and it was too late. They were all at work or school.
How I did it without rupturing my spleen escapes me. I dragged this and that into the hall and adjoining rooms and started vibrating from plummeting blood sugar levels. I panic-ate an apple and paced around, talking angrily to myself. Forty-five minutes after bringing the good Doctor home, I was ready to clean my first room.
My God! The noise! It sounded like the launching of the space shuttle! The dog shot off and the cat’s ears flattened back. I started pulling it behind me across the carpet and that’s when I realised that most households don’t have such a thick pile as ours. Trust me, you can lose your car keys in this thing. Every lap was like furrowing a field! Five laps and I needed to sit down! And you really need to keep up a consistent, slow-but-not-glacial pace. The brushy rollers really need to get in there while the detergent and hot water squirt into the pile; but linger too long and you’ll have a long strip of waterlogged carpet behind you and no way of drying it quickly.
It took me a few turns to get used to this, and to shut off the squirt mechanism before reaching the end of a lap. After half an hour I was a sweaty mess, but the bucket was ready to tip.
How SATISFYING that was. That residual water was as brown as coffee and swirled with grit and wet fuzz. The carpet I’d cleaned stood to attention, stiff with water and heat, like it had been licked by a giant cat.
But then! I had to do it all over again!
By the time I’d finished one room it was clear that the carpet now had the same moisture content as the atmosphere outside. I threw open the windows, and it was COLD. This thing was not going to dry within the appointed time.
I’d chewed through two hours easily but didn’t have six hours of heavy cleaning in me. I decided to do the rug near the front door — compacted as it was by years of comings and goings, paws, suitcases, sports equipment, inadvertently tracked dirt, and the odd spilled drink. Then I would do the sofas.
I have to tell you, the rug was fun. It’s circular, so I dragged that thing in a spiral and could see the lovely tide marks where I’d been.
The sofa was less fun. I had to wrangle the hand-held device, screwing it on and switching vacuum nozzles and draining certain tubes and testing suction. By this point I was businesslike and nimble, like a tyre gunner in the pit lane at Formula One. I dragged the brush head across the sofa frame and cushions, and it took forever. There is a lot of surface area on a sofa. By this point it was past lunchtime and the lounge was as humid as a greenhouse.
I drank half a cup of tea and considered my options. My options were, continue and there will be nowhere dry to sit for the rest of the day. Or, stop while you’re ahead, accept you’ve only done one room and one sofa, and hire it again on a sunny day.
I chose the latter. Now I had to dismantle, swill out and clean the damned thing. I had to flip it over and clean the bristles underneath, which were choked with wet wool. I did this by using a metal comb I’d once bought in a pet shop, back when the dog was small and accepting and let me brush his moustache.
So I washed and combed the Rug Doctor, took it back to the shop, received my refunded bond and went back to my wet house, like Jeremy Fisher in a Beatrix Potter story.
I admitted defeat, closed most of the windows and turned on the central heating system for the rest of the afternoon.
I had not had enough to drink.
I went to bed early, without drinking. I forgot to turn off the heating system. I was basically doner on a spit.
I woke up and felt like all my organs had left my body and I was just a dried-out bag of skin. I felt too off to drink my morning coffee. I was too weak to go downstairs and see the results of my labours (a sparkling, neutral-smelling sitting room; a sofa almost squeaky with cleanliness; a rug beautifully crunchy underfoot). I fell into restless, dreamless oblivion, feeling worse every time I woke up. This continued until Sunday afternoon when I understood I was in caffeine withdrawal, so chugged a moka-pot coffee and two Ibuprofen and suddenly felt like the Princess of Wales.
I don’t know what to tell you. I did everything wrong. I now have just the one filthy sofa, bristling with DNA, and a pristine one. I find myself sitting opposite the clean one, gazing at it and its newly-plumped edges. I take pleasure in walking across the sitting room carpet, springy and possibly less ugly than previously, although it’s still oatmeal, let’s face it. I can’t face hiring the Doc again until next summer, so if you ever come over, I suggest we avoid the living room altogether and go into the garden and drink.
I mentioned to my friend Vanessa that I was hiring the cleaner in the same week I needed to book a bikini wax and she replied something along the lines of, “From one Rug Doctor to another,” and honestly, that was the best laugh I’ve had since this whole debacle started. I wiped the smile off the face of a few flea eggs and dust mites, for sure, but in doing so I think I took six months off my life.
I’m going to have to find a way of living peaceably with them. The filthy little pricks.
Things Making Me Happy
Tom Sainsbury is a national treasure. He has a way of satirising New Zealanders from all walks of life, but he does it from a warm and affectionate place. You just know he absolutely loves people.
I think his Neon series Small Town Scandal is a comedy triumph. I know Felicity Kendal is the bona-fide star of the ensemble but there are comic performances by local actors that need acknowledging as genuinely world-class. Morgana O’Reilly as frustrated suburban mum Katie, Alexander England as the supercilious cop Matt, Jodie Dorday as randy Auntie Janine and Loren Taylor as police receptionist, Meredith, made me howl. And spot Karori’s own Carrie Green as a hapless duty solicitor, more interested in her look than her case file.
It’s absurdist and a touch gothic, as export-ready New Zealand humour tends to be, but I think there’s a coming-of-age quality about the comedy of Small Town Scandal. It feels like we’re moving somewhere new. I also like that it’s shot in unremarkable suburban settings around Wellington and the car driven by Tom Sainsbury, a tiny little wind-up thing with eyelashes over its headlamps, is one I recognise, often parked on a nearby street. So, I tip my hat to the location scout and props department.
I can laugh about it now, but I had 48 hours of radio regret after appearing on RNZ Saturday Morning last week. I sounded absolutely demented talking about sides of the bed, and what a salt pig in your kitchen says about you.
I suppose if I were to apologise to anyone, it would be to Fiona, a listener who texted in to disagree with me for saying a salt pig is the most useless thing in a kitchen. In fact, she said, they’re very good for keeping salt dry. “I didn’t expect to be challenged about this,” I heard myself telling the presenter, Susie Ferguson.
I’m not sure somebody with as little impulse control as I have should be loosened onto a live, nationally-broadcast radio programme but honestly, a few days later and I feel fantastic, like shaken champagne, or Camilla Parker Bowles lighting up a fag after a big day with the Hunt.
Tally-ho!
Lovely column, Leah.
I hate Rug Doctors. No matter how well the last hirer cleaned the machine it always feels like you're bringing a little bit of their DNA (and goodness knows what else) into your house.
Also, we have a salt pig. It's ugly, but it's very good - at holding salt, and being close to hand for salting pasta or potato water. I won't hear a bad word said against them!.+
"By this point I was businesslike and nimble, like a tyre gunner in the pit lane at Formula One."
Hahaha amazing! 😂
I remember my parents hiring a carpet-cleaner vac when we moved house. My brother's bedroom had a horrible old brown carpet that stank of stale tobacco. They slogged themselves silly over it and couldn't get out the smell.
Not long afterwards, our window cleaner said he'd seen a ghost smoking a pipe through the window. So Rug Doctors must be pretty good, but they're no match against a smelly haunting.