Most people buy furniture and let the fabric on that furniture go its entire lifespan without ever doing anything more than using the occasional spot cleaner on it. If that sounds like you, don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s less a matter of neglect and more a matter of just not knowing better. The reality is, even when upholstery looks clean, it usually isn’t. A clean white cloth and a little bit of water rubbed on one of the arms or headrests will show you that pretty quickly.

Manufacturers and professional cleaners recommend getting upholstery (like carpet) professionally cleaned once every 6 months to 1 year, depending on use. For light colors, that frequency may increase. For homes with pets or similar circumstances, it may even be an as-needed basis.

The Process of Cleaning Upholstery

The upholstery cleaning process goes through a number of simple steps to ensure a thorough and accurate cleaning:

• The professional will examine the piece of upholstery, noting any specific concerns or trouble areas and then discuss with the owner.
• Spotters and chemicals will be tested in an inconspicuous area of the fabric to ensure the colors won’t run and no damage will be done, always in accordance with manufacturer labels or recommendations.
• Stains and problem areas will be addressed with the appropriate cleaning methods.
• Steam extraction or similar method will remove remaining dirt and grime from the upholstery.
• Post-inspection will be performed with the owner, noting any issues.
• Optionally, there could be the application of a protector, like ScotchGuard, to help reduce soiling in the future.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, whether your upholstery needs to be cleaned or not is a choice that is up to the individual. If it is dirty and isn’t a problem for you, don’t clean it. However, bear in mind that regular cleaning and inspection can greatly extend the life of your fabrics. At the very least, I would personally recommend cleaning your most-used pieces once a year and having a protector applied. That will save you money in the long run by not requiring the same frequency of cleaning down the road.

I’d love to hear from you if you have questions or concerns. For more information or an inspection of your own upholstery, call Alex with Bon-Care at 757-715-0503 or email info@bon-care.com. We service many areas in southeastern Virginia, including Hampton, Yorktown, Newport News, and Norfolk.

The things that tend to stain carpet the most, greases, oils, starches, sugars, and others, are often not the ones which cause damage to the carpet itself. What does cause physical damage to the carpet fibers, however, are particulates like sand. Sand is, ultimately, tiny pieces of silicate which resemble glass. Imagine rubbing your feet all over tiny shards of glass and grinding them into your carpet fibers every day. Unfortunately, that mental image is closer to the truth than most homeowners would like to admit. During the winter, salt from roads and sidewalks can cause the exact same problems as sand, though often compounding them and making them even worse. Just like the silicates that comprise sand, salt is made of a sharp crystalline structure as well, causing damage for exactly the same reasons.

Counteracting the Negative Effects of Sand in Carpeting

Vacuuming on a regular basis is essential for the local area. Additionally, consider having both an indoor and an outdoor mat (which should also be cleaned regularly) in order to catch anything on your shoes without allowing it to track into the home. For people interested in even more “carpet protection”, it may pay dividends to remove shoes once in the house and place them on a rack. That will prevent anything from being tracked in and will also prevent the carpet from wearing faster in high traffic areas.

It pays to have your carpets professionally cleaned at least once every 6 months, more often if your carpet sees heavier traffic. A good maintenance program can extend the life of your carpets by decades. One final thing to note: while rental steam units do clean better than simple household vacuums, they do not have the suction or power necessary to do a true deep cleaning or remove all embedded particulates in your floors. They may be less expensive but you pay for the low cost in other ways, unfortunately.

For residents of the tidewater region in Virginia, regular carpet cleaning and maintenance is even more important for the longevity of flooring than it is in other areas. Protect your investment by scheduling regular cleanings and considering a floor maintenance plan.

Bon-Care Custom Cleaning is a professional carpet and upholstery cleaning company which has been serving the people of southeastern Virginia since 1975. For a free estimate and inspection, call Alex at 757-715-0503.

Vacuuming, unfortunately, is usually seen as a chore. It is something that we do because we either have to or because our carpet has become dirty with all that nasty stuff that is being tracked in from the front porch. So the question is: Why is it actually important?

This question, also unfortunately, is often overlooked by many people. When asked, they flounder about trying to find an answer to the question. Usually the result is: the carpet is dirty. It needs to be cleaned. A solid answer. There are, however, many things that are being discarded to come up with a simple answer like that. The logic doesn’t naturally flow to the consequences of not vacuuming on a regular basis.

Here are a few of the reasons why vacuuming is important for any carpet (and for under cushions and in crevices of upholstery as well):

• Not vacuuming can lead to carpet damage – If you don’t vacuum up sand and dirt that collects in your carpet, then continued use of the carpet will grind those particles together with your carpet fibers, leading to damage. Vacuuming, thus, extends the life of your carpet.
• There are invisible dangers in your carpet – Allergens, bacteria, dead skin cells, and many other particles that are often invisible to the naked eye are collecting in your carpet all the time. Vacuuming will remove these. Make no mistake; even if you do not see these things in your carpet they are
• Not vacuuming could lead to higher soil distribution – First we step in the entryway. Then the hallway. Then the stairs. Then the upper hall. Then the bedrooms. By the time we get to the bedrooms, all of the dirt on our shoes is gone. But where did it go? A lot of it went into the entryway, the hallway, and the stairs. When you don’t vacuum on a regular basis, you risk heavily soiling those areas and then re-tracking that dirt from those areas to the cleaner areas of your home.
• Pride – We are all proud of our homes. Not vacuuming has a very real and obvious effect on our carpeting. Nobody wants their friends, family, or visitors to see a dirty carpet when they walk in.

Differences in Vacuums

The type of vacuum that you are using can make an enormous difference in the quality of cleaning that you are doing. First of all: you want a powered vacuum (that you plug in). The manual ones that work with brushes and have no actual suction look nice sometimes and they are relatively inexpensive, but they simply aren’t going to get the job done. You want a powered vacuum with rotating brushes on the bottom to agitate the carpet and one that has good suction in the vacuum. Try a few out. Ask for recommendations. Don’t settle for something because it’s cheap. You know what they say: You get what you pay for.

Recommendations

I usually recommend vacuuming the whole house once every week or once every two weeks, depending on traffic, and vacuuming the high traffic areas (hallways, stairs if you can, entryways) at least twice a week. Cleaning the high traffic areas more will lead to less requirements for the rest of the carpet. Don’t make things complicated for yourself if they don’t have to be.

A high traffic area on a carpet is an area that sees much more use than the rest of the carpet. Think about areas that you utilize in your home. The pathways leading to those areas are very likely going to be the high traffic areas of your carpet. This could include entryways, stairs, hallways, and areas around furniture that is used often. Anywhere on the floor that sees a lot of foot traffic is going to be a high traffic area. Generally, in residential homes especially, you can walk around the house and follow the traffic patterns on the floor as if they were designed to be there.

How Do High Traffic Areas Affect My Carpet?

There are a number of problems that are often associated with high traffic areas. The first of these problems is the carpet pile. Often, the areas that are the most used on the floor will have had their fibers crushed and will not sit as high as most of the rest of the floor. If you find yourself walking through your home and you come across areas that look flat, dull, or worn, then you have very likely found one of the high traffic areas of your home.

The second problem with high traffic areas, and the more important of the two, is that these areas see a bad combination of two things: extra wear due to increased foot traffic and extra soil. The more soil is in a carpet, the more quickly the fibers will wear down from particles grinding them underfoot. In high traffic areas, the increased foot traffic acts as a force multiplier and will do two things: soil the carpet deeper and more quickly and grind the soil and particulate matter harder into the carpet fibers. The other side effect is that the dirtier an area of carpet is and the flatter the fibers in that area, the more easily that dirt can be transported underfoot to other areas of the carpet and, thus, soil even more of the carpet than otherwise would be.

How Can I Help Maintain My Carpet Health?

There are a few ways that you (or, more likely, a professional) can help maintain the health and durability of your carpet:

• Regular cleaning of high traffic areas – Generally, it is recommended that the entire carpet be cleaned once every year and that the high traffic areas be cleaned every six months (or more often, depending on exactly how much traffic the area sees.
• Steaming flattened pile – There are two ways of doing this: Either brush the pile after a regular steam cleaning using a thick bristled brush in the opposite direction the pile is laying to raise it or lay a damp wash cloth on the affected area and heat the cloth with an iron and use the brush. If you opt for the iron method, be extremely careful that you do not accidentally melt the fibers. They are heat resistant in most cases, but it is better to be safe than sorry
• Raking flattened pile – Some carpet professionals will be able to rake the carpet with a specialized tool in order to restore carpet pile that has been flattened. Ask about this service if you have a professional in your home. Any company worth their salt will either do this as a part of their service or will offer it for no additional charge upon request.
• Utilize mats – This one is obvious. Use a mat and wipe your feet prior to entering the home. This will help prevent the carpet from soiling to begin with.
• Remove shoes – Removal of shoes is sometimes seen as a sign of respect or a cultural thing, but it can help reduce carpet wear and will greatly reduce the amount of soil being tracked throughout the house.

There are a number of issues that can arise in areas of the carpet that see more foot traffic than others. These areas are more likely to wear and, if not kept clean, can increase the risk of tracking dirt and particulates onto the cleaner areas of the carpet. Keeping your high traffic areas clean and durable will lead to keeping your entire carpet looking healthy and extending its life.

We have all seen them. There you are, driving down the street and you pull up to a stoplight and see a cardboard sign that offers a whole house cleaning for $50. You think to yourself: “That is too good to be true.” The truth of the matter is, you are correct. Most of the companies that you see offering deals like that are too good to be true.

Bait and switch is a form of fraud that is often found in retail and service sales environments. Typically it consists of two steps. The bait is when a customer is shown an item or a service at a very good price through advertising or marketing materials. When the customer either visits the store to inquire about the item or the company arrives at the customers’ home, they find that either the item is not available or the service is not what they expected. They are then offered similar, but more highly priced items or services (the switch).

With carpet cleaning services, this is all too common. You will set up a cleaning for a house and be given a finite estimate over the phone and, upon arrival, the technician will inform you that your house has “unusual corners” in some rooms or that closets do not count as part of the house. Another typical trick is to advertise cleaning “five rooms” or so for a certain price and then informing you that your dining room actually counts as two rooms because it is too large.

Other common tricks can include the following:

• Charging extra for vacuuming
• Charging extra for pre-spray treatments
• Adding an upcharge for deodorizer which usually comes standard
• Upcharging for each additional spot in each room
• Not telling you about extra charges until after the cleaning is finished
• Not including carpet pile raking as part of the price

How Can I Tell if an Offer is Legitimate?

There are a few ways that you can tell if a company or an offer is attempting a bait and switch tactic:

• Offering very cheap services (well below the average going rate)
• Cheap flyers with spelling or grammar mistakes
• A non-professional looking website
• They are unprofessional when answering the phone
• No uniforms (usually jeans and a T-shirt upon arrival)

What Do You Recommend?

Should you suspect a company or an individual is trying to trick you once they are already inside your home, there are some simple things you can do to find out:

• Review their credentials – They should have records of training available upon request (maybe not on them at the time, but they can provide information about their training).
• Ask about the process – They should be able to explain the process in full.
• Ask how long the drying time is – Again, this is something that they should (at the very least) have a ballpark figure.
• How many years have they been in business? – The longer the better.
• Find out if they have any references you can call – A company that has been in business should be able to provide at least one or two referrals for their services if pressed.
• Find out if they have the proper paperwork – Insurance, business license, etc.

The first (and best) solution is always going to be avoiding these companies to begin with. Usually these types of tactics are combined with high pressure sales techniques and a lot of smooth talking. There is nothing wrong with being offered additional services when you are getting a cleaning done, this is very common. There is, however, an issue when you start being pressured to order services which you either do not understand or do not need. The best bet when looking for a legitimate company is to check for reviews on that company, see if the company has a good standing with the Better Business Bureau, and to look out for warning signs. A good professional cleaner is going to offer services that are worth the perceived additional cost (when compared with cheaper, less qualified companies).