Cleaning Your Microfiber Couch

Many moons ago, the husband and I decided that we needed a new couch. We had recently bought our first house and felt we needed something that fit our new living room. We set a budget and headed to the local furniture store. We knew that we wanted a sectional sofa but that was it. Style, color and fabric were all up in the air. I found one or two couches that I liked but not THE couch. Over the next couple weekends, I dragged my poor husband to every furniture store in a 50 mile radius looking for THE couch. I couldn’t find it. Finally my husband looked at me and said “PICK SOMETHING.” So I did. Of course I picked one of the two couches that I liked on our very first day of searching. I’m honestly shocked that he didn’t kill me.

As we sat discussing color and fabric options, the sales person asked if we had or were planning on having kids. We didn’t have kids at the time, but we knew that kids were in our future. Based on that, the sales person recommended a microfiber couch with Scotch guard. “It’s kid friendly and really easy to clean” he said. “Great!” we said. “We’ll take it in green.” Two weeks later, our new couch arrived and we loved it. I still love it. It’s comfy and it has tons of room.

Of course now that it is 6 years and two kids later, I often find myself wanting to hunt down that sales guy and ask him what the heck he was talking about when he said that it was kid friendly and easy to clean. Microfiber is most certainly not easy to clean. And EVERY SINGLE MARK shows up on it. Try to wipe up the mark and maybe the mark goes away but you are left with a water mark. With two kids (one who is a huge drooler), my couch looked like a disaster.

Nothing that I tried seemed to help. I saw on Pinterest that you could clean your microfiber couch with rubbing alcohol. I didn’t pin it because I thought “No way does that actually work.” Well one day I got desperate. Nothing was working and my couch looked like this: (this was the nicest looking cushion by the way)

So I grabbed some rubbing alcohol, an empty spray bottle, a sponge and a scrub brush:

I put the rubbing alcohol in the spray bottle, sprayed the couch cushion and scrubbed with the scrubby side (that’s the technical term) of the sponge. After the cushion was dry, I ran the scrub brush over the cushion just to “fluff” the microfiber. If you skip the last step, your microfiber will feel stiff.

Here is the final result!

AMAZING, RIGHT?

A couple tips:

* Don’t forget to open the windows, run a fan or something to allow for air circulation or you may find yourself faint from the alcohol smell. Not that I would know.
* Because my couch is so big, even with the windows open and a fan, I still had to clean it over two separate days just to keep the smell down. The smell only lingers for a bit. Once the couch is dry you can’t really smell the alcohol anymore.
* Use a sponge without dye in it or if you don’t have/can’t find one, test this method out on an unseen part of the couch first just to make sure that the color of the sponge doesn’t transfer.
* The alcohol dries quickly so you need to be liberal when spraying it. And work quickly.

Of course this isn’t a permanent solution because my drooler still drools and my kids still spill so I’ll need to do this again, but at least now I know that I have a way to clean my couch when it gets gross.

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