Rugs cost £35 or £51, and size decides which. A rug up to 3 square metres is charged the lower figure and anything bigger the higher one. A rug of 2m by 1.5m is exactly 3, so if yours is about that size or smaller, it is the lower rate. The fibre changes how we clean it and leaves the price alone.
| Service | Price |
|---|---|
| Bedroom | £36 |
| Living room | £43 |
| Through lounge | £61 |
| Stairs, per flight | £41 |
| Rug up to 3m² | £35 |
| Rug over 3m² | £51 |
| Bedroom, with a move-out clean | £29 |
| Living room, with a move-out clean | £36 |
| Stairs, with a move-out clean | £35 |
Cleaned on your floor
We do the work in your house. The rug is rolled back, a waterproof sheet goes down, and the rug is laid out on top. Its back gets vacuumed first: grit works down through the pile and settles at the base of the knots, and a surprising amount drops out once the rug is turned over and patted. Then comes the dye test. A drop of our cleaning solution goes on a hidden corner with a white cloth pressed on it for a minute, and if any colour comes away on the cloth, we change the plan before anything else gets wet.
Wool and synthetic rugs then go under the extraction wand, more slowly than a carpet and with less water. Fringes are cleaned last by hand with a soft brush, because a soaked fringe draws dye out of the body of the rug and leaves a pink or blue shadow along the ends.
Fibres we go carefully with
Viscose goes by other names in the shops, art silk and bamboo silk among them, and it looks lovely right up until it gets wet. It can turn hard and matted, and some spills go brown as the rug dries. Those rugs get a low-moisture clean, and on a few of them the best advice is to leave the thing alone. Hand-knotted rugs coloured with vegetable dyes get more than one dye test. Anything antique belongs with a specialist rug washer who has a wash pit and a drying room, and we will point you there when you ring.
Drying
Flat on the floor with a window open, turned over once. A thin cotton flatweave can be dry in an hour or two; a deep wool pile takes most of the day. Please do not throw it over the banister or a washing line to hurry it along, as a heavy wet rug pulls out of shape.
Rugs in W5 houses
A lot of the rugs we clean in Ealing lie on original floorboards or parquet in the front rooms of the older houses around Castlebar and Ealing Common. The good part is that a rug on a wooden floor lifts easily and can be cleaned with no worry about the floor underneath. The less good part is the underside, because boards let dust rise through the gaps and the back of the rug often ends up dirtier than the face. Ealing’s water is hard, so on a pale wool rug we go easy on detergent and rinse well, which stops a chalky dullness showing once it dries.
If your rug sits on fitted carpet, we can clean the carpet underneath while we are there. Spills and pet accidents are covered on the stains page, and the full list of rates is on our prices page.
Questions we get asked
Do I need to move the rug before you come?
No, leave it where it is. Take the small things off it and we will lift it onto the sheet ourselves. If a sofa stands on one edge, we can lift the sofa or clean around it, whichever suits the rug.
Our rug is 2.5m by 1.7m. Which price is that?
That works out at 4.25 square metres, so it is £51. Anything up to 3 square metres, around 2m by 1.5m, is £35.
Can you get the dog smell out of a wool rug?
Usually most of it. Where a dog has wet the same spot many times, it has gone through to the backing, so we treat it from the back as well as the front. The dye test comes first, because urine can shift the colour and that part may not recover.
Is a cheap rug worth cleaning?
If it cost less than £35, probably not, and we will say as much on the phone. A flat grey hallway runner can look far brighter afterwards. A cheap printed rug can lose some of its colour, which is why the test on the back matters.