Rug Cleaning in Clifton
Collection and delivery in Clifton are included. We take the rug back to the workshop, wash it properly, and bring it home.
What Clifton is built from
Frankfort Avenue between Mellwood and Crescent Hill, on the terrace below the bluff and close to the Middle Fork of Beargrass Creek: shotguns, camelbacks and modest brick houses from the 1880s onward, many standing on limestone or rubble foundations over dirt-floored or half-finished cellars, with larger houses toward the top of the hill.
A neighborhood restored house by house rather than all at once, with a lot of hands-on owners and a lot of old floors. Rugs are frequently on a ground floor laid directly over an unheated cellar.
The Clifton problem
Clifton’s water arrives in February, and the cause is frozen ground rather than rainfall. When the top few inches of soil thaw over a subsoil that is still frozen solid, meltwater has nowhere downward to go — the frozen layer acts as a lid — so it travels sideways across the top of it until it meets something. On these lots that something is a nineteenth-century rubble or limestone foundation whose mortar joints have been prised a little wider by every freeze and thaw since it was built. What comes through is a slow seep along one line of a cellar wall over two or three days rather than anything dramatic, and it will not happen again until the next mid-winter thaw, so it never gets fixed. A rug on the floor above, or on the cellar floor itself, takes it as a damp line and a smell rather than as an obvious wetting, and by the time anyone notices, the cotton foundation has been wet for a fortnight. That needs flushing and flat drying with the moisture actually measured. Nothing about it responds to a dehumidifier standing in the room.
If that sounds like your rug, send the form and describe what you are seeing. We will tell you whether it needs the full treatment or not.
We collect from these too
Ready when you are, Clifton
Free inspection, free collection, and a real number before anything starts.