Two frames of one staircase, from our own photo set. The carpet is a woven two tone, bands of oatmeal alternating with bands of blue grey. The record carries no town, no date and no customer name, so none of those appear here.
The left frame is mid job, not a before
The extraction hose is lying across the treads in that picture, so the work had already started when somebody took it. We could label it a before and almost nobody would look closely enough to argue. It is a mid job frame and that is what we call it.
The carpet in it has not been cleaned yet, which is why it still works as a comparison. The oatmeal bands read orange brown, blotchy, with traffic soil through them. In the right frame the same carpet reads evenly and the banding is the pattern again instead of the dirt. That is what the pair shows. We are not going to put a percentage on it.
What we did
- Cleaned the flight by hot water extraction, heated solution into the pile and back out through the same head in one pass.
- Worked the whole staircase by hand, because no machine head sits flat on a stair tread.
- Cleaned three faces on every step: the tread underfoot, the riser your toe hits, and the carpeted stringer at the side.
- Started at the bottom step and moved up, so anything coming off a step landed on one still waiting to be cleaned.
- Shot the second frame from the same position, so the two pictures can be put side by side.
Why stairs take longer than a room
A staircase holds more carpet than people expect and none of it is flat. Three faces to a step, each at a different angle, all of them reached by kneeling. A room of the same square footage is one person walking a wand in straight lines.
Stairs are also where a clean shows most, because a staircase is the only carpet in a house you look at from directly above, at eye level, in whatever light comes off the landing.
What you should know
- The weave does some of the work in this pair. Soil that lands evenly on a plain carpet can pass for the color of the carpet. Put a pale oatmeal band next to a darker blue grey one and the pale band gives it away.
- Carpet is normally walkable about two hours after we finish. That is our general figure, not a stopwatch reading from this house. The record does not say how long the visit ran.
- Both pictures are unretouched. Cropped and resized, nothing else, no color grade and no filter.
- The record does not say what put the soil in this carpet, so you will not read here that it was a dog or a hard winter. What the frames show is soil at the base of the pile coming out.
- You get a written estimate before anything gets wet. There is no storefront and no drop off point, the van comes to the house, and appointments can be booked at any hour.
When to call us
Call when the stairs look grey from the landing, or when the treads have gone a shade darker than the carpet above and below them. What the method does, and what it will not fix, is on Carpet cleaning. We cover eight North Jersey counties, Bergen County and Essex County among them. More pairs from the same set are on Before and after.
