One frame from our own job photos. Carpeted stairs in Alpine, in Bergen County, steam cleaned. Steam cleaning is the everyday name for hot water extraction, which is what the machine in the van does. There is no before picture in the file, so this page is a record of the finished flight and nothing else.
What the photograph shows
Grey carpet on a straight flight, shot from the bottom looking up. Plain pale walls sit close on both sides and there is a white rail fitting on the wall to the right. The round badge in the top corner is our logo and not part of the house.
On a fresh clean the strokes show. The treads carry straight passes running across the step. The risers carry shorter marks set at an angle, because a riser has to be worked from the side and the tool comes in and turns. Those marks are pile direction. They are not dirt and they are not damage, and they settle as the carpet dries and people start using the stairs again.
We are not going to tell you how bad the flight looked beforehand, because there is no beforehand in the file. The picture supports one thing, that this staircase was cleaned. Our record carries no date, no customer, no price and no step count, so none of those appear here either.
Why stairs are hand work
No machine head sits flat on a stair tread. A tread is short, it has a nosing that rolls over the front edge, and the riser behind it stands up at a right angle. A floor wand is built for a flat run of carpet, so on a staircase it misses most of what needs cleaning. Someone kneels on every step with a hand tool instead.
That is why a staircase takes longer than the same square footage of bedroom floor. Every step has more than one face on it and each face is worked on its own. We start at the bottom and move up, so anything that comes off a step lands on one still waiting rather than one already done.
What we did
- Dye tested first, on a spot that does not show, before any water went into the carpet.
- Cleaned the flight by hot water extraction, which puts heated solution into the pile and pulls it back out through the same head in one movement.
- Worked the staircase by hand, because no machine head sits flat on a tread.
- Cleaned the risers as well as the treads, not only the face you walk on.
- Used non toxic solutions, which is what goes into every house we work in.
- Photographed the finished flight from the bottom of the stairs.
What you should know
Carpet is normally walkable about two hours after we finish. That is our general figure for carpet cleaning rather than a stopwatch reading from this house. Stairs are the surface people are most impatient to get back on, so it helps to book a time of day when the flight can sit for a couple of hours without everyone in the house needing it.
The dye test comes before the water. It means putting solution on a small spot nobody sees and checking that the color stays where it is. On a staircase that spot is usually low on a riser or tucked in at the side.
You get a written estimate before the work starts. There is no storefront and no drop off point for wall to wall carpet. The van comes to the house, and we book by appointment at any hour.
The photo is unretouched. It was cropped and resized, with our logo laid over the corner, and nothing else was done to it. The file does not record why this staircase was cleaned, so you will not read a cause here.
When to call us
Call when the stairs read darker than the carpet at the top and bottom of the flight, when an inspection is coming, or when the treads have gone flat and vacuuming stops changing anything. The method is written out on Carpet cleaning. This job was in Alpine, and the town page is Bergen Countyalpine/, with the rest of the county on Bergen County. We work across eight North Jersey counties, including Essex County. More finished jobs are on Before and after.
