Whatever the reason, you might just have to confront some bothersome blood stains in your house or on your clothes. Perhaps you’ll have to deal with a blotch of blood on your best pair of jeans, carpet, bedsheets, sofa, counter tops – and unfortunately, blood really isn’t a pretty decoration for your fabric or furniture. If a blood stain is taken care of right way, it can be more easily removed. However, if it has time to settle into fabric or a piece of furniture, you’re in for a real challenge.
So here’s how to remove those ugly and annoyingly stubborn blood stains.
First off, you will remove a blood stain based on where it is. Blue jeans require a different cleaning method than jewelry, for example. So let’s take on the most common victims of pesky blood stains and discover how to make them spotless.
What about fabric? Well, there are so many different kinds of fabric out there! Since a lot of clothes are made of nylon, cotton, and polyester, let’s talk about how to remove blood stains from those types of materials. If a blood stain hasn’t set in much, you can wash the clothes with cold water and usually that will do the trick. However, if this doesn’t work, you still have options. You can soak the blood-stained fabric in liquid laundry detergent, warm water, and ammonia. Then you can scrape or brush off the blood and lightly blot it with a cloth. After the stain disappears, rinse the fabric with water.
For items made of vinyl and most copper and gold jewelry, you can simply apply sudsy water to the blood stain and you’re good to go. Note, however, that silver should be washed with warm water – not cold water.
As well, many materials don’t require very intensive work to get a blood stain out. For concrete, sandstone, marble, brick, and granite floors, for instance, only a sponge soaked in cold water is necessary. For marble, if cold water doesn’t work, you can add powdered detergent to the mix. Same goes for sandstone, concrete, brick and granite – except typically liquid detergent is better in these cases.
Carpets are a lot more challenging than those smoother, rockier surfaces. You’re going to have to rely on some more sophisticated products to remove a blood stain from a carpet. But you might want to mix the carpet stain solution with some detergent as well (in addition to water, of course). It’s crucial that you only gently blot the stain; if you are too aggressive, you’ll only rub the blood more deeply into the carpet, rather than remove it. If you still are looking at that blood stain after all this effort, you might have to turn to ammonia. Use a cloth to gently rub the ammonia and water onto the surface. Let the carpet dry on its own.
(Unlike with many stains that don’t survive when attacked by vinegar, ammonia is more of the standard go-to cleaner for blood stains.)
Leather and suede materials are especially unique when it comes to stains, and blood stains are no exception. They must be handled carefully. Mix some water with the suds from a mild soap (like Dove), and lightly apply it to the stain. Make sure you don’t spread the stain! After this, you can apply some leather conditioner to the area.
If you have a blood stain on wallpaper, you need to try to remove it as quickly as possible. Because once blood gets comfortable on such material, it will stay there for ever. Again, use a cloth dipped in cold water to battle the stain. Make sure the cloth isn’t soaking wet, however, as water can carry the stain to other parts of the wallpaper. After you’ve softly rubbed the stain with the cloth, get a drier cloth to help it dry. You will actually use this same method for wood! However, wood should be exposed to water for less time than the wallpaper.
An additional tip that you might find useful is that peroxide apparently can get rid of an especially irksome blood stain. But considering that peroxide has powerful chemicals, you’ll want to research it before you go around attacking stains with it left and right!
The basic rule of thumb for a blood stain, or any stain for that matter, is to deal with it right away. You may like to put chores off, but when it comes to this, you can’t afford to procrastinate. We all will endure cuts and bruises in our lifetime, but we don’t have to have permanent reminders of it on our clothes, furniture, floors, and walls. And it’s not likely your guests will want to have reminders either!
So hopefully this article has enlightened you about how to clean blood stains and you can make sure that when the color red pops up in your house, it is part of a planned color scheme and not an unplanned accident.
