How a rug was made decides how it must be cleaned — and the difference between a hand-knotted rug and a hand-tufted one isn’t obvious until somebody shows you where to look. Four questions, answered by looking at your own rug.
A hand-tufted rug run through a hand-knotted process comes back smelling of degraded latex. A viscose rug treated as wool comes back yellow and brittle. An antique with unstable dyes washed hot comes back with red bleeding into the ivory. None of those are reversible, and all of them come from misreading construction at the start.
If you’re unsure after this, send a photo with your quote request — a picture of the back tells us more than a picture of the front.
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.
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.