It’s every carpet cleaner’s nightmare and it happened to Juan just in time for Halloween. Brace yourself for this gory story.
The technician arrives at a customer’s home. He rings the doorbell and starts to feel unsettled as the chime wails and dies off. Glowing eyes peak through the curtains of an adjacent window. A hooded figure with gnarled hands opens the door and beckons the technician inside.
The door creaks eerily closed behind him and slams – latching in place and the technician jumps! The hooded figure cackles, delighted by his fear. The technician lowers his gaze and sees the most neglected wall-to-wall carpet he’s ever seen in his life! Black trails of unidentifiable fluids snake through the house. The odor or neglect assaults his senses. The technician nervously follows the hooded figure down the dark, dirty hallway. A black cat darts across his path as the hooded figure guides him toward the living room – they enter a cavernous room and he lifts his eyes to see the trifecta of carpet cleaning issues!! His hands shake as he sends a plea for help to the office and is never heard from again.
Just kidding. This was actually a very sweet customer (with normal hands) who had long terms tenants who were vacation and of course, I’m utilizing some literary license here to protect the innocent and to make our Halloween story more exciting. What the tech did report was the following impossible situation:
- 25-year-old carpeting with well-worn and damaged traffic areas
- Extremely soiled carpeting that hadn’t been cleaned in the last 20 years
- A customer with extremely high expectations
While we have cleaned up crime scene level carpet soiling before, the tricky one here was the expectation of the customer that we can clean a carpet in this condition and make it look new again. This is not possible.
Halloween gore and artistic license aside, in all seriousness, below is the actual wall to wall synthetic carpeting that Juan went to see last week, and you can see that the level of damage here is pretty high. It’s important from the customers side to understand that while we can improve this significantly, there is fiber damage and permanent staining that we cannot resolve – no matter what arsenal of products, decades of experience and top of the line equipment we throw at it. Years of oil, grease, foot traffic, toads and entrails cannot be resolved with cleaning. Substances that have been brought in over years from the bottom of shoes have been ground in, grease from cooking has been allowed to settle on the carpet and attract sandy soil causing irreversible damage to the fiber shaft, and stains from spills have penetrated deep into the carpet fibers and set.
It’s hard to know what advice to give when we enter a situation like this.
- We won’t know how much better it will get before we try.
- Cleaning is always more cost effective than replacement.
- We do not want to get stuck in a battle between an owner and a tenant.
Proper maintenance is critical in every aspect of our lives, right? It’s no different with carpet cleaning. If you neglect carpeting, instead of remediating or preventing long term damage, it compounds. With regular cleaning even a heavily soiled carpet can be brought back to life, but one that has been completely neglected is generally a candidate for the graveyard (landfill.)
Our recommendation is always to try to clean if possible – it is better for the earth, and frankly it is better for our company – however, sometimes cleaning is just not an option, as you can see from these before and after photos. I am thinking Frankenstein here… The wrinkles, the worn traffic areas, the deep staining – this carpet is beyond the end of it life so there really was no hope and Juan could see that before he started – but this customer insisted on the cleaning.
Follow steps for regular maintenance (such as cleaning up spills quickly, regular vacuuming, professional cleaning twice a year, and using carpet protector to increase vacuum efficiency between cleanings) and prolong the life of your carpet, rather than being the cause of its untimely end.
Happy Halloween!!
