My Entry for Day 622: 5 Minute Freewrite: Thursday - Prompt: wet carpet
The car had been parked out in the open for a few days while it rained, after which I discovered the carpet on the floor behind the passenger seat was saturated. My partner helped me to investigate the cause which led us to discover a leak in the seal around the front windscreen.
There was so much water inside my car the carpet actually squelched as I tried to soak the water up into towels, tea towels, even paper towel (which only took 2 seconds to disintegrate, leaving me with bits of paper towel litter all through the carpet as well!)
Through my keen interest in alternative eco-friendly/home/DIY type solutions for pretty much everything, I had discovered salt can be quite useful for drawing water out of unwanted places (e.g. dropped your mobile in the toilet? No worries! Simply place in a bowl of salt overnight and the liquid is absorbed straight into the salt crystals leaving the electronic components inside your device dry and functional)….but I digress…..
I thought surely I could apply this concept to my wet carpet car flooring situation, so after drying as much as I could with the towels, I confidently poured a good 2kgs or so of cooking salt all over the passenger side floor of my car, making sure I got right underneath the front seat, down the sides and everywhere. I even removed the plastic covers from the ends of the front seat rails and where the centre console joins in at the back there. And of course the carpet underlay was just as wet so I shoved salt under the carpet through the openings I had just exposed by removing the plastic bits before.
Now I’m thinking it’s time for a break while the salt does it’s thing. The following day I found that I needed more salt, yesterday’s salt was now a slushy mess and I still had wet carpet, so in went more salt. I did this for the next few days then left it a bit longer to make sure it would be dry enough to vacuum up.
A short while later the error of my ways was brought to my attention in no uncertain terms by my older brother who sternly asked me if I was familiar with the corrosive effects water, oxygen and salt have on metal surfaces, and then joined the corrosive rusty dots to my vehicle chasse which is of course METAL.
The weight of the proverbial rock that hit the pit of my stomach at that moment was almost enough to make me sick. I found myself stuck in that moment where someone tells you exactly how wrong your “bright” idea was. Nevertheless there was work to be done – a lot of work to say the least. Lost count of how many times I ran the vacuum through the car trying to lift the salt out of the carpet fibres. Not to mention the skill required to manoeuvre the various attachment tools into all those hard to reach crevices and gaps I had filled with salt! I really did screw myself over with this.
But on the bright side, with every mistake we make comes an opportunity to learn, improve our knowledge, grow, and impart our wisdom on future generations so that they too may learn and grow….
That’s all well and good as long as you actually pay attention and LEARN THE LESSON within the mistake…
A few weeks later I also learnt that you shouldn’t use salt to try and dry out unsealed timber flooring that is suffering from rising damp….! 
Ugh, well, I hope the car ended up ok. I never heard of salt to dry. Today my DIL brought macaroni salad to the picnic. She had ziplock bags with salt in it to keep the food cold. I never heard of this either.
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I don't think it was in there long enough to cause too much damage....it broke down not long after anyway and I couldn't afford to repair it so have been borrowing my father in law's car ever since and haven't paid too much attention to it!
I know that salt added to water enables it to boil at a higher temperature and also freeze at a lower temperature but I didn't know that salt on it's own had cooling effects - it's a great idea though, unlike an ice pack the salt wouldn't ever defrost I guess!
I neglected to say the ice was mixed with salt lol. Good luck on the car situation.
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I'd heard of rice, but not salt, to salvage a wet phone - and it doesn't always work. Should've tried salt, eh?
Water damage is ubiquitous in the Midwest, but I tell myself it's better than the all-consuming wildfires of the West. Nothing to salvage--just ashes.
Good reminder: Mistakes are learning opportunities. The word 'crisis' also means 'opportunity' in Japanese, or so I've heard.
Timber flooring... sounds like another story there!
Oh maybe I should have used rice in the car instead! That seems a way safer option...
That's really interesting about the Japanese meaning for crisis, the Eastern cultures and their way of thinking is quite profound in some ways compared to the Westen cultures...makes sense to me anyway :)
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