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.
That depends far more on the rug than on the calendar. The wash is the predictable part; controlled drying is not something to hurry, because a foundation that goes back down still damp will announce itself later as a smell. Repair work is scheduled on top of the wash once the assessment is finished.
You do not. Collection is booked around your schedule, and plenty of people simply leave the rug rolled inside a front door or a vestibule. The written assessment and the figure both reach you before any work is authorized.
Size, construction and condition all move the number, so the honest answer is that we quote after looking rather than before. A figure offered sight unseen on a hand-knotted piece is invented. The assessment itself is free, and you are under no obligation afterwards.
Not if the salts are actually removed. The crystals sit down in the foundation, and any method that only wets the pile leaves them there to reactivate the next humid week. Flushing the rug right through is the only thing that clears them out. Long or repeated soaking may also have damaged the dye permanently, and that gets flagged at assessment rather than discovered at the end.
Every rug is dye-tested first; nothing goes into water untested. Unstable dyes — often an older red, sometimes a later synthetic — get a lower temperature, a shorter time in the bath, or a surface method instead of immersion.
Usually, and age is rarely what decides it — the state of the foundation is. We look at the structure before anything else, and a rug that needs securing gets that done first, because a weak foundation does not survive being handled wet.
No. Anything done on the floor treats the top of the pile and drives the rest downward into a foundation that then has to dry in place, on your hardwood. Soil leaves a rug through the back, which means the rug has to come off the floor to be washed at all.
Send the approximate size and whatever you know about where the rug has been living — hardwood, a basement, a room that runs on radiator heat all winter. We’ll answer with an estimate and a pick-up slot. No figure is settled before the rug has been measured and inspected in person.