The Best Furniture Cleaning Options for Pet Stains

Every pet owner knows the unique sense of horror you feel when you realize your pet is about to leave an awful stain on your furniture, and it’s too late to stop them.

Whether your dog made a beeline for your couch with muddy paws, your puppy had an accident, or your cat threw up, the aftermath usually includes a feeling of despair mixed with defeat.

But, like they say, cats will be cats, and dogs will be dogs.

Which will inevitably result in stains on your furniture.

But no need to worry: Stanley Steemer is here to help! From everyday maintenance tips to our professional furniture deep cleaning services, we’ll make sure your furniture is safe from the hazards of pets living in your home.  

Understanding the Impact of Pet Stains on Furniture

First, let’s talk about common types of stains and the damage they cause, as this determines the steps you’ll need to take.

Stains Caused by Dogs:

Dogs commonly stain furniture with mud, urine, vomit, drool, and feces. Mud won’t pose the same biological risk as the other contaminants, but it can still be difficult to remove without staining your furniture.

The other contaminants will all result in bacteria growing deep in the fibers of your furniture’s upholstery, where they’ll multiply over time, even after you’ve cleaned the surface.

It’s extra important to be proactive about comprehensively cleaning after these sorts of stains to protect your family’s health and prevent discoloration and unpleasant odors. Pet urine is also especially acidic and will lead to discoloration quickly if not treated properly.

Stains Caused by Cats:

Cats tend to be less messy than dogs, but they can still leave stains if they become ill, cough up a hairball, or decide to mark on your furniture. Like dogs, vomit or any kind of spit up from hairballs will need to be cleaned promptly to nip odor-causing and illness-spreading bacteria in the bud. Anything that comes from an animal’s stomach is also bound to be acidic enough to discolor furniture if you aren’t proactive in cleaning it up.

In the rare event that your cat marks the furniture, cat urine will pose the same risk of discoloration and odor as dog urine does.

How to Remove Pet Stains Yourself

Like with your carpets, it’s not realistic for us to come to your house every time your pet leaves a stain. And even if you called us each time, the crucial window for immediate mitigation would have already passed before we could arrive at your house.

When it comes to tough stains, the initial cleanup is essential to give you the best chance at avoiding damage to your furniture and being able to fully clean the spot later during professional cleaning. Take action immediately and be strategic in what you do.

Here are our best tips for initial cleanup:

1. First, remove what’s on the surface. This means removing any solids on your furniture without pressing downward and using a white towel to blot any excess liquid.
2. Once you’ve removed as much of the contaminant from the surface as you can, use a spot cleaner to take on the remaining bacteria at the surface of your upholstery. This will keep your family safe from the bacteria that sits at the surface of a pet stain, avoiding illnesses like E Coli and Salmonella.
   

   Stanley Steemer’s spot remover is effective on upholstery and our top recommendation, as it breaks down bacteria at the source to prevent discoloration. Note: our spot remover is safe to use on most fabric types, but we still recommend testing it on a small, inconspicuous area of your furniture before applying it to the entire stain to ensure your furniture won’t experience color bleeding.

3. To target odors, consider Stanley Steemer’s “Odor Out!”. This product gets rid of odors at the source by encapsulating the odor-causing bacteria to prevent it from reproducing or off-gassing as it breaks down over time.

That said, no retail cleaning product can permanently resolve pet stains, as some level of bacteria will still be able to grow deep in the fibers of your upholstery. If left without a professional cleaning for years, you might see discoloration or even odor return.

To get deep in the fibers of your furniture and thoroughly clean spots, you’ll need to bring in the professionals on a regular schedule.

Stanley Steemer Removes Tough Pet Stains From Upholstery

We generally recommend that pet owners have their upholstery professionally cleaned every 6 months. This assumes that your pet will bring different stain-causing messes to your upholstery and also accounts for the fur and dander that becomes embedded in your upholstery fibers over time.

Stanley Steemer Upholstery Cleaning Method

How is our professional upholstery cleaning superior to a retail cleaner? For our professional services, we use a hot water extraction process to flush stain and odor-causing bacteria and fur out of your upholstery fibers, where they are extracted back into our machine. In this way, these substances are knocked out of the fiber they were clinging to and fully removed to prevent replication of bacteria.   

Deodorizing Upholstery

In particularly tough cases where hot water extraction isn’t enough, we have a deodorizing treatment that works similarly to Odor Out!, except the solution is stronger, as our techs are trained in how to work with your specific type of upholstery. They know what they can use and how much while keeping your furniture safe.

Applying Protectant Spray to Upholstery

We also have a protection spray that acts as a barrier between your furniture and pet stains in the future. This will make it easier to mitigate damage at home in between cleanings, as the protectant prevents stains from easily going deep in your upholstery fibers.

That said, each situation is unique. That’s why the first thing our technicians do on a job is an inspection to see the extent of the damage to your furniture and offer advice regarding the best add-ons for your situation.