Why upholstery is a different job from carpet
Carpet is one fiber on one backing, laid flat, and it can take a lot of water. A sofa is four or five materials at once, the face fabric, the thread it is sewn with, the foam inside, the deck underneath the cushions and the frame, and they all react differently to moisture. Put carpet volumes of water through a sofa and the padding stays wet for days, the frame can mark the fabric from below, and a water ring appears exactly where the wet part met the dry part.
So upholstery gets a low-moisture method: enough solution to break the bond between the soil and the fiber, immediately extracted, with the foam underneath never getting soaked. It takes longer per square foot than carpet and it is the only sane way to do it.
The test patch is not a formality
Before anything touches a cushion, an unseen part of the same fabric gets tested, under a skirt, on the back panel, beneath a seat cushion. Some fabrics release their dye. Some, certain silks, viscose blends and older linens, mark with plain water, never mind cleaning solution. Finding that out on the back panel costs nothing. Finding it out on the seat is not recoverable.
If a piece fails the test, we say so and stop. That is a better outcome than a cleaned sofa you no longer want in the room.
Where the dirt actually is
Look along a three-seat sofa and it is rarely dirty evenly. The two cushions people use are darker than the third. One arm is worse than the other. The headrest area behind where somebody sits has a shadow on it.
That is body oil, hair product and everyday skin contact, and it is not the same kind of soil as the crumbs and dust that fall into the crevices. It needs pre-treating before the general clean, or you end up with a sofa that is clean in the places nobody touches and still grey where the family actually sits.
Under the cushions is a separate matter again, that is where coins, hair, food and the majority of the pet hair live. It gets emptied and cleaned before the faces are touched.
Leather is a conditioning job as much as a cleaning one
Almost every leather call is really the same call: a sofa that sat near a window or a radiator, went dull, went stiff, and started to look old before it should have. Sunlight and dry indoor heat pull the oils out of the hide. Cleaning removes surface dirt but takes a little more oil with it, so cleaning alone can leave leather looking worse.
The two steps go together. Clean, then condition, put back the flexibility and the depth of color. A customer whose leather couch had gone lifeless beside a bright window described the result afterwards as expensive-looking, soft, and smelling of leather again. That is what the conditioning step is for.
Booking an upholstery visit
Tell us how many pieces, roughly what they are made of, and whether there are pets. If you know the manufacturer’s cleaning code, the letter on the tag under a cushion, that helps, but it is not essential; we check it ourselves before starting.
Upholstery is frequently booked alongside carpet in the same visit, and it makes sense to do it that way: the furniture is already being moved, and a clean carpet under a grey sofa tends to make the sofa look worse than it did before.
A sofa somebody photographed themselves
Taken by the customer, published with their review.
