Cleaning Your Oriental Rug
Your oriental rugs and carpets are not just art treasures, they’re also very valuable investments. They must be stored and cleaned properly to maintain the rug itself and increase the value. That’s why you want a Rug Cleaning specialist that will take care of your rugs.
Cleaning
- First, rugs are separated based on being hand made or machine made. Hand made area rugs generally are more sensitive.
- Then we remove as much dust as possible from the rug.
- Rugs are then tested for color fastness. If the colors bleed, we have to use special methods like dry cleaning or extraction to leave the least amount of water as possible on the rug.
- We check to see if there are areas on the area rug more soiled or if stains on the rug. If yes, we pre-treat the area. Please understand that some stains like some pet stains may not be removed as they have permanently changed the colors of the wool.
- If the rug smells and has pet odor, we neutralize and eliminate the odor.
Rugs are then washed with different methods depending on the type, age, color fastness, thickness. In brief, some methods we use include mostly complete soaking and submersion in water, which is the best way to clean, dry cleaning, jet spray and extraction. Fringes are treated separately to prevent damage.
Drying
All of our rugs are laid out flat to dry. Hanging textiles up when wet can lead to too much strain on the foundation of the rugs. Air movers are used to help facilitate drying, without the use of high heat (so there is no worry of shrinkage). Upon a first wash, it is typical for a rug to shrink slightly (less than an inch) - just as cotton and wool clothing does in even a cold water hand wash. And as with throwing wool or cotton in a high heat dryer, you know this shrinks natural fibers…this is why we dry our rugs the way we do.
To protect your investment and for your rug to last generation after generation, please call us to schedule a pick-up or for more information.
