Persian, oriental, wool and silk — washed by hand, repaired by hand.
Charlotte takes about forty-three and a half inches of rain a year and spreads it fairly evenly across every month, which means there is no season in which a rug here gets a proper chance to dry out. Add red clay that comes in wet, a heavy spring pollen load, and a housing stock that runs from 1911 bungalows on brick piers to acre-lot houses over crawlspaces, and the damage is nearly always in the foundation rather than on the pile. Rugs are collected, washed off site by hand, dried flat, and brought back.
A hand-knotted Tabriz and a polypropylene flatweave off a shelf are not the same object, and they should never meet the same brush. Vegetable dyes bleed. Silk scorches under heat. Cotton foundations shrink if they are pulled out of the wash wet and dried under tension. Guessing is how rugs get ruined.
So nothing gets cleaned until it has been looked over: fibre content, dye stability, weave construction, backing, previous repairs, and whatever a run of Carolina summers has left in the foundation. Only then does the rug get a method. That inspection costs nothing, it happens before you commit to anything, and if a rug is not worth the cost of cleaning we will say so.
Wool, silk, cotton, jute and synthetics each get their own water temperature, pH and agitation.
Chewed corners, unravelling fringe, insect grazing and split foundations rebuilt by hand.
Iron staining is treated as chemistry, and a musty rug is flushed in the foundation rather than perfumed on top.
We collect and return across Mecklenburg and Union counties. You never lift a roll.
Washing, structural repair, and getting water back out of a rug before it becomes a mould problem.
Full immersion hand-washing for Persian, oriental, wool, silk, cotton and modern synthetic rugs. Dry clay and grit come out before any water is introduced, then the rug is washed, flushed until the water runs clear, and dried flat under moving air.
Rug cleaning detailsFringe replacement, edge binding, insect grazing, pet destruction, worn pile and missing corners. Reweaving is done with matched wool at matched knot density, so the repair settles into the field instead of announcing itself.
Repair servicesA supply line that split in a January freeze, an attic air handler that overflowed its drain pan in August, or a creek that came up in a thunderstorm. Rugs in that state need flushing and controlled drying, not a fan pointed at them. We extract, decontaminate, dry flat, and document the condition throughout.
Water damage service
Rug care advice written for a dry climate does not transfer here, and neither does advice written for a place with a defined wet season. Charlotte has four real seasons and rain in all of them — a normal July day tops out around ninety, there are roughly forty-four days a year at or above that, and there are still about fifty-nine nights that drop to freezing. Two thirds of the city is green space, so most of these houses sit under canopy, over clay, with the windows open for two months in spring and two more in autumn. Every one of those facts shows up in the rug eventually.
Very few of the soaked rugs we see in Charlotte met a river. They met a supply line that split during a hard freeze in an uninsulated exterior wall, a water heater at the end of its life, a dishwasher hose, or — the one that surprises people most — an attic air handler whose condensate drain blocked in August and quietly put water through a ceiling into the room below. That last one runs for hours before anybody notices, and it lands on the rug from above.
Storm water is the other category. The creeks that run through this side of the county drain a watershed that has been built over for a century, so runoff reaches the channel fast and a summer thunderstorm can put a creek up and down again inside an afternoon. Water that arrives that way has crossed streets, drives and yards, and it is not clean by the time it is in the room. Either way, what matters is what happens next. A wet wool foundation is a growing medium, warmth speeds it up, and drying the surface with a fan leaves the contamination sitting in the base of the pile — producing a rug that seems fine for a few weeks and then does not. The rug has to be flushed, treated, and dried flat with the moisture content actually measured — and photographed before any of that, because that is what an insurer will ask for.
Off-site washing, hand finishing, and a route that runs from Davidson down to Waxhaw.
From Davidson at the top of the county through uptown, Myers Park, Eastover and Dilworth, out to SouthPark and Ballantyne, and south into Waxhaw and Weddington. Collection is included.
One hand-knotted Persian rug, photographed before and after cleaning.
Send the form and we will come back with a real number. Estimates are free and there is no obligation to book.
How rugs are actually built, how to tell hand-knotted from tufted in ten seconds, and what any of it means for a house in the Carolina Piedmont.
Free estimate, collection and delivery included — anywhere on the route.
