Rug Cleaning Lismore
for Timber Houses and Older
Wool

Inland dirt is different dirt. Months of dry heat with no sea breeze drive fine soil right into the base of the pile, and it packs there until the rug goes flat and grey without anybody being able to say when. That load is what a bath removes and a vacuum simply redistributes. Expect about a week between the driver taking it and the driver bringing it back.

• Built around long held pieces
• Inland soil packs down deep
• Priced once, on the bench

Hoop pine and hardwood floors mean the rug is the only soft thing in the room, so it takes everything. On wool, packed soil compresses the pile from underneath and makes even a good rug read as worn out. Wash the load away and the pile stands up again, which is the moment most owners realise the rug was never actually worn out at all.

• The rug takes everything on a hard floor
• Compressed pile is usually soil
• Rinse continues until it runs clear

Almost every stain we cannot fix arrived at us already treated. A cloth, a bottle from under the sink and ten minutes of scrubbing will set the colour and take a patch of dye with it more often than not. Blot it, leave it alone, tell us what it was. Then we test, treat to suit the fibre and report honestly on where the result finished.

• Most failures were pre treated
• Tell us what the spill actually was
• Honest report at the end

Urine drops through the wool and stays in the backing, generating odour from a place no spray can reach, which is precisely why the smell returns each time the air turns humid. Immersion rinses the foundation clean, an enzyme stage neutralises the remainder, and completing the drying removes the moisture that lets the cycle restart. Old damage is assessed honestly rather than optimistically.

• The record sits in the foundation
• Enzyme stage after the rinse
• Old damage assessed honestly

Smell is held material rather than something in the air, which is why every product sold to mask it disappoints within a week. Washing breaks the material down, the rinse takes it out of the rug entirely, and the drying room removes the moisture that let it settle. There is no shorter version of that sequence and nobody has found one in 29 years.

• Held material, not atmosphere
• Masking products always disappoint
• No shortcut exists for this one

Where it works it is far cheaper than a wash and we will tell you when it is the right call. Where it will not work we say that too, because a bright patch in a dull rug is worse than the mark you started with. On older pieces the dye test carries more weight than usual, since some of these rugs were made before colourfastness meant much.

• Cheaper when it genuinely suits
• A bright patch can look worse
• Dye test matters more on old rugs

A student household rug and a fifty year old hand knot are not the same object and should never get the same treatment. Extraction suits the first, costs less and does a genuinely good job. It is never used on hand knotted or hand tufted rugs. The assessment sorts each piece and tells you which method it is getting before any water is involved.

• Right for machine made rugs
• Costs less where it fits
• Never applied to hand knots

Plenty of the older imported rugs in this city were made when dye fixing was a rougher art, and some of them will not tolerate a bath. The test finds that before the tub does. Those rugs are worked in sections with compound, kept supported the whole time, and finished at the pace the method needs rather than the pace a diary would like.

• For dyes from a rougher era
• Found in testing, not in the tub
• Worked in sections, fully supported

Wool that stays wet while rolled up loses ground fast, so the practical steps are simple: get the rug off the wet floor, roll it, and ring with the history. It is put on the bench the day it lands and looked at properly, you are given a straight answer about its condition, and any cost is agreed after that rather than guessed beforehand.

• Two days shape the result
• On the bench the day it arrives
• Answer first, cost second

Growth needs damp and something to eat, and a soiled rug in a closed timber room supplies both without much help. An antimicrobial additive goes into the wash to clear the growth, the rinse carries away the soil feeding it, and the drying is taken right through the backing. Half dried is the reason people find themselves dealing with the same patch twice.

• Damp plus soil is all it needs
• Antimicrobial additive in the wash
• Half dried means it comes back

Heavy furniture in a settled house is the classic setting, and the damage is normally well along before anyone shifts anything. Eggs, larvae and adults are treated together in the one process rather than knocking back a single stage, and the wash then clears everything out of the weave. Where fibre has already gone we show you the spot and give a straight view on repair.

• Settled houses are the risk
• All stages treated in one process
• The lost fibre is shown to you

On a rug that is going back down for another twenty years it is a sensible piece of maintenance, and it stretches the interval before the next full wash. Neither the colour nor the feel of the pile changes. We do not describe it as making a rug spill proof, because it does not, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

• Sensible maintenance on a keeper
• Longer between full washes
• Not described as spill proof