Trapped in My Master Bedroom

Now, before you panic, and think "Oh, my goodness! Someone should call local emergency personnel!!!", let me assure you that my confinement is totally my own doing!

You see, after having my house cleaned and shiny last week, I got a wild hair to have my family room carpet cleaned...it is dirty, gray, smelly, and when my children run or crawl around in their clean clothes with snowy white socks, and then climb up in my lap, and I realize that the knees of Tiny Princess' jeans, and the bottoms of Captain Chaos' socks are stained and dirty, it is because of said carpet. Once upon a time, it was a lovely white nylon carpet with random flecks of a coppery brown, and navy blue. However, not very long after we moved in 6 years ago, with our cat and 2 dogs, and not very well trained husband, it soon became grungy, and a shade slightly off white.

We had it cleaned 4 years ago, and it was snowy white again for about 3 weeks...then, because the company we employed used water and a soap based cleaner, it was worse than ever! (I've decided this is a ploy to get repeat business, but that's an entire post in and of itself) I held off having it done again because we found out we were expecting Captain Chaos, we got 2 new cats, got rid of one dog, got a puppy, got rid of a puppy, and then found out we were expecting Tiny Princess (its been a busy 3 years...no wonder I'm tired!), and knew that Rocco is getting up there in years, and with 2 small children, it didn't make sense to save up and put in new carpet quite yet. I'm hoping it can make it another 4 years before we really have to replace it...we'll see.

At any rate, back to the point at hand - I called a company I used last fall to clean the upstairs carpets while we were out of town that did a fabulous job removing pet stains, and the like (I'll tell you about the folks that lived here before we did sometime). I received a 10% off coupon in the mail a couple weeks back and was toying with the idea of having them come and clean...and toyed with it until last week.

You see, we did all this redecorating in some of the rooms, and have grand plans for still more rooms, and then there was my family room...nicely decorated, done for the time being, where we spend 90% of our waking hours, where the dog lays, where the kids play, where we watch our shows...and the carpet was simply disgusting...as in, EWWWWWWW!!!!!!! Gross!!

So, I called them, and they came last Tuesday to give us a bid for cleaning, and came this morning.

The only thing about having your carpet cleaned at 9am, is that they didn't actually get here and started until 9:30, which means that they didn't finish until 10:30, and it takes at least 2 hours for the carpet to be "dry enough" to walk on...it will be dinnertime before we actually put furniture back on it, but in the meantime, Captain Chaos and I are hanging out, watching Playhouse Disney until lunchtime, at which point I will have to find a way to get lunch made and back upstairs without Captain Chaos being aware of it. We can have a picnic upstairs and watch "Movie Time Monday" before he naps around 2...but I'm nor sure how to feed Tiny Princess without making a mess, and how exactly to handle her playing for a couple hours between noonish and 2-ish, and then getting her back to bed.

After they start their naps, I can at least go down into my entryway, and steam my couch and BBs chair to that is clean also...but if it's not dry enough to play on by dinnertime, we're in trouble and will have to take the kids somewhere for a couple hours...

Oy!