You vacuum your carpet regularly and get it professionally cleaned twice a year. Good job! Carpet is a large investment, and you want it to stay looking nice for a long time. You know what else is typically a large investment? Furniture – especially large furniture with plush padding and soft delicate fabric that gently embraces you as you sink into it after a long day. The padding and fabric covering on your furniture is called upholstery.
Your upholstery comes in direct contact with you, your skin, your dirty clothes, and your kids or pets. It also has indirect contact with anything you had direct contact with during the day and innocently brought home with you. However, very few households clean and maintain their upholstery as well as their carpets, because they don’t have the knowledge, skills, or proper equipment to do it.
As a result, your upholstery likely doesn’t get cleaned nearly as often as your carpets. Thankfully, your upholstery communicates with you – it gives you indications that it needs cleaning attention.
Telltale Signs
How can you tell that your upholstery is telling you something? Look for the following signs:
- Persistent odor – If you have constant exposure to this odor – pet dander or tobacco smoke, for instance – you might not even notice it. The longer it’s allowed to stay, the stronger the odor becomes. Effectively, your upholstery yells louder and louder until you (or your visitors) hear it.Another common odor is a musty smell from improper drying after being cleaned. If left to merely air dry, it allows mold, mildew or bacteria to flourish, eventually giving off a musty scent. The source of this odor might be too deep for regular cleaning methods to remove.
Preferred Carpet Care has over 50 years of experience getting all kinds of odors successfully out of any upholstery. Our 9-step upholstery cleaning process includes quick drying, to ensure residual moisture is eliminated before mold, mildew or bacteria can make a home.
- Fading color or dull appearance – it’s not just time that causes upholstery color to fade. If your upholstery had a luscious sheen before that’s no longer there, your cleaning methods might be too abrasive for the fabric. The issue could also be linked to your furniture’s position in your home, or the air fresheners you use.Talk to Preferred Carpet Care about what kinds of fabric provide the sheen and how you clean it. In most cases, we can refer you to a different, more gentile solvent or household cleaning method. Reviewing a few pictures might give us a great idea on the circumstances.
- Returning Stains – you clean your furniture, and the stain goes away. Days later, it returns! What happened? Well, the stain likely never left. It’s deep enough to where your cleaning methods merely skimmed off the top. A little moisture in the air or a damp set of clothing is just enough to revitalize the stain.Although you might be able to saturate the area with a proper solvent and remove the stain, the safer method is to let the professionals at Preferred Carpet Care handle it. We will inspect, treat, rinse, dry, and reinspect the area to make sure the stain does not return again.
A word of caution: Pet stains often return because pets are drawn to repeatedly mark the same areas through instinct or habit. In that case, removing the behavior is just as important as removing the stain.
- Warped fabric – After a cleaning, it might seem that the fabric doesn’t fit as smoothly on your furniture as it once did. When exposed or saturated with liquids, some materials like wood, stuffing or fabric might twist or stretch, but never return to their original shape. If your upholstery is no longer taught or does not fit right, contact a professional upholsterer to adjust the fabric properly. Of course, having Preferred Carpet Care clean your upholstery with tried and true methods is a great way to ensure your upholstery does not warp in the first place.
You want to enjoy your upholstery as much as your carpet. Let us help you do that. Preferred Carpet Care has the knowledge and tools needed to determine what your upholstery is saying, and we’ll take just the right cleaning method to maintain – and even help restore – your furniture investment.