How to Get Flour Out of Carpet

Flour has a knack of going everywhere. Bakers, you’ll know exactly what I mean!

It coats your apron, your hands, and somehow ends up on your forehead and in your hair! But the worst one of all is when you get flour on a patch of carpet.

The flour tends to spread itself all around, and it sort of looks like it’s snowed indoors!

There’s usually a mad dash to try and clean the debris up. And in the process, you have to keep hold of your kids and pets, so they don’t enter the floured zone and spread the powder around!

It’s usually a lot of fun – not!

All that aside, with the right approach and technique, you can remove flour from a carpeted surface with ease. Just follow the steps below.

Below you’ll find a step-by-step guide on how to remove flour from a carpet. You’ll also find guides on how to take out wet flour and flour pastes from carpeted surfaces too!

 

 

Tips to Remember When Removing Flour from a Carpet

Here are some tips you need to keep in mind when removing flour from a carpeted surface:

• Don’t wet the flour – Moist flour is generally harder to remove from a carpet.
• Don’t walk all over the flour – Keep kids and pets away from the area until you’ve cleaned it thoroughly.
• Act fast – This will limit the chances of getting the flour wet, or people/pets walking over it and traipsing the powder over the rest of the carpet/throughout the house.
• Test any cleaning products – Make sure products are suitable before you use them.
• Be patient – You may need to hoover/clean the floured area multiple times to clean the carpet properly.
• Treat one flour-filled area at a time – Don’t try to clean multiple blemished areas at once because you’ll likely make more of a mess.
• Don’t scrub the carpet – Instead, just blot at it. If you rub the carpet when it’s covered in flour, you’ll drive the flour deep into the carpet’s fibres, and it’ll be super hard to remove. 
• Stick to using cool water
• Consider hiring a professional – If the flour in question has been on the carpet for years and no amount of cleaning is removing it from the surface, you should think about calling a professional carpet cleaner in to help you out.
• Be careful when hoovering lots of flour up – Hoovering lots of flour up in one go can clog up the vacuum cleaner. So always remove as much flour from a surface before starting the hoovering process.

 

How to Remove Dry Flour from a Carpet

The easiest kind of flour to remove from a carpeted surface is dry flour. Follow the steps below to eradicate it from your carpet.

Tools you’ll need:

• Spoon
• Sealable bag
• Vacuum cleaner
• Brush

Steps to follow: 

1. Use a spoon to gently scoop up large heaps of flour from the carpet and put it in a sealable bag – but don’t scrape the spoon along the carpet because you’ll drive the flour into the carpet’s fibres.
2. You must clear big flour heaps away because large quantities of flour can clog up a hoover.
3. Grab your vacuum cleaner.
4. Set it up so its maximum suction is on.
5. Optional: Make sure your vacuum cleaner is set up to clean hardwood floors. This will stop it from crushing and driving the flour deep into the carpet’s fibres as you run it over the tainted patch.
6. You can start hoovering up the flour with the hose attachment. This works very well if the flour is all in one place.
7. Hold the hose away from the carpet by about an inch and allow the suction to work its magic.
8. Continuously hoover the carpet. This may take you several minutes to do.
9. If there are bits of flour wedged into the carpet’s fibres, loosen them by brushing them out using a bristled brush.
10. Re-hoover the carpet.
11. Optional: If you need to clean the carpet, you can do so using some washing-up liquid and water, or a carpet shampoo.

 

How to Remove Wet Flour from a Carpet

If you’ve used some flour to clean up an oily spill, or the flour has gotten wet somehow when it’s on the carpet, you’ll need to brush the damp, sticky flour with a hand brush to loosen it up from the carpet.

As you brush, the flour will start to clump together, and you can hoover the chunks up. This process will be quite slow, so be patient and stick with it.

When you’ve done this, you can mix a few drops of washing-up liquid in a bowl of cold water, and start to blot the carpet with a damp cloth that’s coated in the soapy mixture. This’ll remove any lasting flour from the surface.

After you’ve done this, you can carefully blot the area clean with a second damp (make sure it’s not saturated) cloth and allow the carpet to air dry.

To speed up the drying process, gently press some neutral-coloured cloths into the damp area so you can absorb the liquid from the carpet, and open plenty of windows.

 

How to Remove a Flour Paste from a Carpet

To remove a floury paste from a carpeted surface, you will need to brush the area very gently, so the floury mixture binds and starts to clump up together into chunks.

Once you’ve done this, you can vacuum the loose chunks up.

You’ll then have to repeat these steps multiple times to clear up the rest of the flour paste from the floor.

When you’ve done this, you can clean the area by blotting some washing-up liquid and water into the surface.

After doing this multiple times, you can blot the area with a damp cloth to remove any cleaning product residue, and then you can leave the carpet to air dry.

 

How Do You Get Flour Out of a Carpet Without a Vacuum?

You can use a carpet sweeper to remove flour from a carpeted surface if you don’t have a vacuum cleaner.

A sweeper like the Bissell 2402E Sturdy Sweep Manual Floor Cleaner would be an ideal tool to have in this situation.

Just keep in mind that a sweeper won’t have the same sucking power as an actual vacuum cleaner, so you’ll have to repeat the steps outlined above multiple times to remove all the flour from the carpeted surface.