A hand-knotted rug has to be washed off the floor, flushed through the back and dried under control. Put one through a carpet machine and the dyes travel, the wool browns as it dries and the fringe comes away — and none of that reverses.
How a rug was built decides how it can be washed: the knot, the foundation, the fiber, and whether the dyes will hold once they are wet. These twelve traditions cover almost everything we collect across the Upstate.
Dusting, dye testing, washing, drying and repair are done by the same hands in the same building. No rug is handed off to a carpet cleaner partway through.
A wool rug will carry several pounds of dry grit before the surface looks any different. It settles right at the base of the pile, under the reach of a vacuum, and every footstep grinds it against the fiber. Rain arrives here hard and in bursts, close to 48 inches of it across only about 117 days, so what comes in on shoes is sand and washed clay rather than fine household dust.
Submersion washing carries that out through the back of the rug instead of driving it deeper. The dyes are tested before the rug goes anywhere near water, because bleeding is the one fault that cannot be undone afterwards.
Greenville grew as a textile town, and a lot of what we collect reflects that — rugs bought for formal rooms in houses built when the mills were still running, and inherited since. Alta Vista, the streets off Augusta Road, Cleveland Forest and North Main hold the highest concentration of older hand-knotted work in the county, most of it sitting on heart pine over a vented crawlspace.
That combination decides what we see. About 48 inches of rain reaches the ground here in only 117 days, and the air holds at or above 75 percent humidity for 133 days a year. Ground moisture rises through an old floor assembly in summer and settles into the foundation of whatever is lying on it. Winters are mild — 37 freezing nights, two of them hard — so damage here is far more often water that stayed too long than fiber that was dried out and made brittle.
A rough size, the room it lives in, and a photo if you can manage one — ideally of the back as well as the front, because the foundation shows what the pile hides. We’ll reply with an estimate and a collection window that works around you. Nothing is costed until the rug has been unrolled and gone over properly.