Removing Gum From Stair Tread Rugs and More

Gum seems to get into all sorts of areas it does not belong, even if you do not have children or even chew gum. We’ll discuss techniques to remove gum from stair tread rugs as well as other rugs and carpets.

Unfortunately it sometimes will hitchhike it’s way into your home or office on footwear and more. Although the techniques we discuss will be primarily in regard to rugs, many of them will also work with gum in clothing, upholstery, hair (yeech!) and more. And often it gets ground and mashed in, especially in high traffic floor areas like halls and stairways.

Step one is getting as much off as possible. Freeze it with ice cubes or ice packs for fifteen plus minutes and then break off as much of the now stiff gum as you can. I like to put the ice cubes in a zip lock or similar bag for obvious reasons. A spatula or spoon works well to break off frozen gum but be careful not to damage the rug fibers.

An alternate first step is heating the gum, for example with handheld hair dryer, and then using a plastic bag to pull it from the rug. Heat it enough to make it soft and pliable and you’ll find it sticks quite nicely to a plastic bag or similar and pulls off well. There might be some trailing web like strings when you do this; be careful they do not fall back down into the rug making even more of a mess! Of course you do not always have an outlet handy to power the blow dryer so you may need to use the ice cube trick above.

There will likely be a small amount of gum left in the carpet. To remove the rest, use a liquid cleaning solution. Lots of choices here, including dry cleaning fluid, special gum removal solutions available from professional cleaning stores, commercial cleaning solutions for tough jobs like “Goo Gone,” or my favorite because we normally have it around the house, any muscle pain treatment fluid or jell that contain methyl salicylate; Ben-Gay for example works well. You blot, best you can, the remaining gum remnants up or use a plastic bag just like with the blow dryer trick when using Ben-Gay. Of course with commercial cleaning compounds you also might want to read the directions.

Last step, wash the rug. You can use a commercial rug cleaner like a Hoover carpet cleaner, or just a little dish detergent in a cup of warmish water to rinse the affected rug area and then pat dry.

You know Singapore supposedly has outlawed chewing gum because it’s messy, and I’ll say in many trips there I’ve never seen any. In most of the world however, gum can easily get into your stair tread and other rugs and get mashed in by foot traffic. Hopefully you’ll never experience this, but if you do now you know how to get it out!