Tips for carpet cleaning

[Stangirl]

I have a pale beige carpet in my living/dining room.

I hate it but am keeping it for a couple of more years whilst my DD destroys it. It is hoovered once a week but over the last 3 years has collected quite an impressed set of stains. These are mostly red wine with one or 2 coffee/tea. At the time the spillages happened they were scrubbed with washing up liquid. a cuple of the more stubborn ones were then treated with some hardcore carpet stain removers. All this has done is stain the carpet darker. What should I do to improve matters?
Is it worth getting professionals in to clean it? What else can I do? It's filthy.

I have annoying cream carpets that were in the house when we bought it.
Professional cleaning was expensive so I have tackled one room a week with a bowl of water with bio washing liquid and a scoop of boosting stuff for washing and scrubbing brush.It has worked well. I am planning to keep them clean with a home carpet cleaner now they are clean.

How about getting it professionally cleaned, then keeping on top of it youself after (if that makes sense) x

We had ours professionally cleaned and it looked fab at the time but it must have taken the scotch guard out of it and went down hill v quickly after that. Do what the other poster said...with the bowl and scrubbing brush, I do that on mine, when I can be bothered

Buy a rug?

Hmm - i can't do the scrubbing because i have morning sickness and my DP won't do it.

Oh Stangirl poor you with morning sickness! During my pukey months the state of our carpet got worse and worse, DH was useless! I remember once asking him to hoover and he said "but I did it last week"!!!

We also have a beige carpet with stains all over, and no intention of throwing good money after bad while DCs are little.

My solution was to make the carpet cleaning into a proper manjob. You can hire a carpet cleaning machine from B&Q for the weekend - I think it's about 15 quid plus an extra tenner for the cleaning fluid. DS and I went away for the weekend and left DH with his new toy! The carpet looks much better now although some of the worst stains are still visible.

Re general maintenance, I find our carpet looks progressively more awful if I don't do some every day. I can't manage our massive Dyson and really couldn't be arsed getting it out every day any way, but I recently bought an old fashioned carpet sweeper for a tenner, and run this over the middle bits every day. That way grot doesn't get trod in so much so the carpet still looks clean.