Navajo, Persian, and Other Handmade Rugs Need a Different Kind of Care

A wall-to-wall carpet and a handmade rug are not the same material, even when they look similar underfoot. A Navajo weaving, a Persian or oriental rug, a silk or wool area rug, is made of natural fibers, hand-dyed and hand-woven, and it is often worth more than the room it sits in. Cleaning one the way you would clean synthetic wall-to-wall carpet can cause damage that does not show up until it is too late to undo. That is why area and oriental rug work is its own line of business for us, not an extension of the regular carpet job.

Why the fibers matter

Wall-to-wall carpet is almost always synthetic, built to be walked on and steam cleaned repeatedly without much fuss. A Navajo rug, an oriental or Persian rug, a silk rug, or a leather shag rug is different, often wool or silk, hand-dyed, and hand-knotted or hand-woven by someone. The dyes can bleed if the wrong solution or too much water gets used. The weave can loosen at the edges if it is handled roughly or run through equipment built for synthetic fiber. Specialty and heirloom area rugs need to be looked at individually before any cleaning method gets chosen, not run through the same process as the living room carpet because they happen to both be soft and on the floor.

When cleaning turns into repair

Rugs that get real use eventually need more than cleaning. This is where the work moves from washing into conservation, and it covers a specific set of problems:

• Edge surging and binding, when the outer edge of a rug starts to fray or come apart
• Fringe replacement, when the decorative fringe at the ends is worn through or missing entirely
• Hole reweaving, when a section of the rug has worn away or been damaged and has to be rebuilt thread by thread
• Rug appraisals and evaluations, to establish what a rug is actually worth before deciding how much repair makes sense
• Custom rug pads, built to the size of the rug rather than sold off a shelf
• Moth repellent treatment, since a wool rug sitting under furniture or in storage is exactly what moths look for

Reweaving a hole or replacing fringe on a hand-knotted rug is slow, deliberate work, closer to textile conservation than a typical cleaning appointment. It is also not something most carpet cleaning companies in the Albuquerque area offer at all. Plenty of companies will clean a rug. Far fewer will tell you honestly what it is actually worth, and fewer still will rebuild a worn section of it rather than simply suggesting you replace the rug and move on.

Pets, stains, and the rugs people worry about most

A lot of the rugs that come through our shop are family pieces, not just decor picked up to fill a floor. It is common for a customer to bring in an antique rug that a dog has marked, worried the piece might be ruined for good. Situations like that come up often enough that pet stain and pet odor removal, along with water and mildew solutions, are standard parts of the rug service rather than a special request tacked on afterward. The goal with an heirloom piece is always the same: get the stain and the smell out without doing more damage to the rug than the original problem already did.

What this means if you own one

If you have a Navajo rug, a Persian or oriental piece, a silk or wool rug, or anything you would call an heirloom, the first question is not what a cleaning costs. It is whether the rug needs cleaning, repair, protection, or some combination of the three, and that answer is different for every rug in every home. An honest evaluation before any work starts is really the only way to answer it properly.

Protection, not just repair

A rug that has just been cleaned or repaired is also the easiest time to protect it from the next problem. A custom rug pad built to the actual dimensions of the piece keeps it from sliding on hardwood or tile, and keeps air moving underneath it instead of trapping moisture against the floor. Moth repellent treatment matters most for wool rugs that spend part of the year rolled up in storage or tucked under a bed, since that is exactly the environment moths look for. Neither of these is expensive compared to the cost of the rug itself, and both are easy to skip if nobody mentions them, which is part of why they are built into the rug service rather than offered as an afterthought.

DanCare Carpet Cleaning handles both sides of this, the cleaning and the conservation, for rugs across Albuquerque, Rio Rancho, and the East Mountain area. If you have a rug you have been putting off dealing with because you were not sure who to trust with it, call us at (505) 890-6500.