Rug Cleaning in Old Louisville
Collection and delivery in Old Louisville are included. We take the rug back to the workshop, wash it properly, and bring it home.
What Old Louisville is built from
Roughly the mile between Broadway and the university, built out between the 1870s and the early 1900s and preserved largely intact: three-storey brick and stone Victorians, Richardsonian Romanesque and Queen Anne fronts, pressed-brick terraces, and the pedestrian courts off St James and Belgravia. A great deal of it was cut into flats during and after the Second World War and much of that subdivision is still in place. Heating started as cast iron — steam and hot-water radiators — with forced air added later in some houses and not at all in others.
One of the largest concentrations of preserved Victorian houses anywhere in the country, holding whole-house restorers, flats carved out of buildings that were once a single household, and student housing near the university. Rugs run from inherited hand-knotted pieces sized for fourteen-foot parlours to modern rugs bought to fit a room that used to be half of one.
The Old Louisville problem
Two things in these houses do the damage and both of them are heat. The first is the radiator. A cast-iron radiator standing on or beside a rug does not warm a room evenly — it drives a narrow band of very hot, very dry air across the floor around it for six months of the year. Wool normally carries something like a seventh of its own weight as water, and in that band it gives it up long before the rest of the rug does. The result is a stripe: fibre that is stiff and brittle where the heat sits, a cotton foundation that has shrunk more there than anywhere else, and a rug that will not lie flat by March because one part of it is a different size to the rest. Fold or roll it across that band and the wool cracks rather than bends. The second is the subdivision. A rug woven for a fourteen-foot parlour is now crossing a partition wall, a doorway or a threshold strip that was installed eighty years after the rug was made, so it is being flexed along a single line every time somebody walks through — and that line is very often the same one the radiator has already dried out.
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, Old Louisville
Free inspection, free collection, and a real number before anything starts.