Keeping carpet clean is tough. I have found guests subtly protest against taking their shoes off.. New guests or clients are happy to take their shoes off (I'm a photographer so clients come to my home for meetings) but friends can be rude 'oh what? are you serious? you want my shoes off?' that annoys me I have 2 cats. Ugh! Pet stains = Ugh! I am a germofobe.. Well I'll kiss my kitties.. otherwise if I was THAT much a germafobe I wouldn't have cats.. but one of them has a thyroid disorder and sometimes the poor little guy vomits. My mistake has been spending a lot of money testing different carpet cleaning products, and a lot of the time sponging the carpet clean with such products would create a bigger mess or spread the stain! Ikea sell $15 metre square colorful rugs. I bought 6.. black, red, pink, yellow, green, blue when they are laid next to eachother it looks like one big rug, and this has helped a lot. Its so easy to wash one rug when a cat pukes, than it is to wash the actual carpet I have discovered that Vinegar is a bit of a miracle washer! If I clean the cat vomit with vinegar I get better results than ANY product from the shelves. I recently didn't realise that a lemon fell from my shopping bag behind a polyester ikea crate full of clothes, and the lemon had developed that dusty black mould and the mould dropped to the carpet It vaccumed up easily but I washed that part of the carpet by hand with cloudy ammonia. I read online that ammonia kills germs like mould. I seem to have made a big water stain though which I'm annoyed about I paid a local carpet cleaner guy $100 which was a bargain for a 2 room clean of a 1 bedroom apartment. The people I hired last year charged me $140 as they wanted extra money to come up one flight of stairs. This man was lovely. Even though I vac twice a week and mop almost daily, his industrial machine got up 2 large handfuls of cat hair!!! He said the minute I told him I had pets over the phone, he brought his special equipment. Unfortunately I messed up the carpet where I used the cloudy ammonia. There's just some darker markings like water staining, so I'm trying the watered down laundry soap routine this time

You might try soaking them in lacquer thinner overnight and then scrub them with a stiff bristled brush. You could also use a hotter faster flashing solvent like MEK but be careful this stuff is pretty potent. Good luck.....

I always use vinegar in my laundry when something is very smelly. Especially smoke from a campfire or way back in my smoking days. Fill a Downy Ball and toss it in the washer. Don't need fabric softener that way either. And no, your clothes don't smell like vinegar. My sister had trouble with the cats tracking across the freshly washed kitchen floor and sometimes licking at it. I told her to use a vinegar/water solution as it's a great cleaner and cats usually don't like the smell. They won't go near it until it's dry and once it dries, the vinegar smell is gone. Vinegar is often used in places with fires to absorb odor, as is vanilla but vinegar is far cheaper. Vinegar is a useful item to have around. Salt, vinegar and baking soda clean a drain out quite nicely. 1001 uses for vinegar Here is a link that might be useful: 254 uses for vinegar

My knowledge of Chem-Dry is all second hand. Not many positive posts on Yelp for them. I saw the results of their cleaning at an athletic club many years ago and it was not all that good. My own experience is that there is only one type of cleaning machine that got the grime out of light colored carpet in my previous home . It was a machine that had three small pipe arms with holes that rotated into the fibers as the cleaning solution squirted out, while a vacuum in the unit sucked the dirty cleaning solution back into the machine. The operator could turn off the soap and only rinse and vac. hot water. That took out all the grime left by another cleaner that merely used a spray head and vacuum. We have about three local companies in our community that use the rotating head machine. Of course, it also depends on the operator being thorough. I prefer to get the work done early in the morning so that I am the first to use the hot water and it is not cooled off too much. The truck had a heater to keep the water hot, but I think it might cool down in spite of that.