Persian, oriental, wool and silk — washed by hand, repaired by hand.
Rugs here are damaged by the season rather than by the traffic. The furnace runs from October into April and takes the humidity in the house down into the teens, which dries wool out and shrinks a cotton foundation unevenly. The streets are salted from the first freeze to the last, and every bit of that chloride comes in on a boot. 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 what a run of Ohio Valley winters 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, moth grazing and split foundations rebuilt by hand.
Chloride is dissolved out in immersion, and wool that spent a winter at desert humidity is rehydrated rather than brushed.
We collect and return across Jefferson and Oldham counties and over the bridges. 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 grit comes 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, moth damage, 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 hard freeze and let go on the thaw, a sump pump running against a frozen discharge line, or a basement floor drain backing up. 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
Most rug care advice is written for somewhere warm, and it quietly fails here. Louisville sits on the Ohio at the north end of the region, and the year has a real cold half to it: the heating season runs from roughly October into April, the ground freezes and thaws repeatedly, and the roads are treated with deicing chemicals for months. A rug in this city takes almost all of its damage between Thanksgiving and the first warm week in spring, and almost none of it is the kind of damage that shows up as a stain.
Very few of the soaked rugs on this route met a river. They met a pipe that froze in a garage ceiling or an outside wall and split, and then let go under mains pressure hours later when it thawed — which is why so many of these calls start with a house nobody was standing in. Others met a sump pump running against a discharge line iced closed at the outlet, or a basement floor drain that came back at them during a wet spell.
The low ground along the Ohio is its own category. Behind a floodwall a high river does not come over the top; it stops interior storm drainage from discharging, so rain falling inside the wall has to be pumped out, and when there is more than the pumps can move it surfaces at the lowest opening in the building. That is drainage water, not rainwater, and it carries what drainage water carries. Either way, what happens next decides the rug. A wet wool foundation is a growing medium, and a house with the furnace running is warm enough for that all winter. Drying the surface with a fan leaves the contamination at the base of the pile and produces a rug that seems fine for a few weeks and then does not. It 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 Old Louisville out to Prospect and over the bridges.
From Old Louisville and the Highlands out through St. Matthews and Middletown to Anchorage, Prospect and Norton Commons, and across the bridges into Jeffersonville, Clarksville and New Albany. 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 that runs a furnace half the year.
Free estimate, collection and delivery included — anywhere on the route.
