Rugs, not carpets
Greenville Rug Cleaning & Restoration handles hand-knotted and flatwoven rugs for households across the Greenville area. Cleaning, repair, restoration, and free pick-up and delivery.
Why a rug is different
Wall-to-wall carpet is cleaned where it lies, and it has to be. A rug can be taken away, submerged, flushed through the back and dried under control — which is the only way to get soil out of a foundation rather than push it further in. Anyone who cleans your rug in your living room is cleaning the top of it.
Hand-knotted rugs also behave unlike anything else in a home. Natural dyes can bleed. Wool holds lanolin that alkaline detergents strip. Silk scorches. Cotton foundations rot if a rug is left damp. The right treatment depends entirely on how the rug was made, which is why we look at every one before quoting.
What happens to your rug
We collect it, inspect and photograph its condition, and test dye stability before any water touches it. Dry soil comes out first — often several pounds of it. Then a full-immersion wash with fiber-appropriate agents, controlled drying, grooming, and a final inspection. Repairs, if you've asked for them, happen after the wash. You get it back cleaned, dry and flat.
The process page covers each stage in detail.
Pricing
Estimates are free and based on size, construction and condition. The final price is set only after we've seen the rug in person — a quote given sight unseen on a hand-knotted rug is a guess, and usually a self-serving one. There's no charge for the assessment and no obligation to proceed.
Where we work
Across the Greenville area — Alta Vista, Augusta Road, Chanticleer, Cleveland Forest, North Main, Downtown & West End and the surrounding counties. Full list of areas.
Common questions
Longer than a carpet cleaner would, and the drying is the reason. In air that sits at or above 75 percent humidity 133 days of the year, a rug put away before its foundation is properly dry will grow mildew somewhere nobody can see, so that stage takes as long as it takes. Any repair work is scheduled separately once we know how far it goes.
No. We agree a window with you, and leaving the rug somewhere reachable — a porch, a garage, inside a screen door — works perfectly well. Either way, the assessment and the cost reach you before anything is done to the rug.
It comes down to size, how the rug is built, and the condition it is in. We will not put a firm number on a hand-knotted rug nobody has seen, because that is guesswork with a confident voice. Looking at it costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Usually, though it turns on how long it sat there and how far down it soaked. Urine salts crystallize into the foundation and come back to life with humidity, which is exactly why a surface clean smells fine for a week and then does not — the salts have to be flushed out of the rug, not covered over. Where the saturation was heavy or repeated it can take the dye with it, and we would rather say that beforehand than afterwards.
That is the first thing tested, before any water reaches the rug. Certain older vegetable dyes and a number of early synthetic reds will move, and those rugs get washed cooler and faster — sometimes not by immersion at all.
Often yes, and the fragile ones are frequently the ones needing it most. Age by itself is not the issue; a foundation that has gone weak is. The structure is assessed first, and where a rug needs stabilizing before it can be washed we say so, rather than discover it halfway through.
No, and we would advise against letting anyone. Cleaned where it lies, a rug gets cleaned on one face while the other face just gets wet. The soil is at the bottom of the pile and it leaves through the back, so the rug has to come up off the floor, go into water, and dry under moving air.