Rug Cleaning in Historic District
Collection and delivery in Historic District are included. We take the rug back to the workshop, wash it properly, and bring it home.
What Historic District is built from
The original plan of 1733 and everything that filled it in afterwards: brick and frame townhouses of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries built around the surviving squares, most of them raised a full storey over a garden level that sits partly below the level of the street. Party walls between neighbours, walled courtyards and lanes behind, and original heart-pine floors on the main levels.
Owner-occupiers, long-standing flats carved out of single houses, and a large number of short-let apartments in the garden levels. Good rugs are common here — inherited, carried in from somewhere else, or bought to suit a room with twelve-foot ceilings and very little furniture in it.
The Historic District problem
The garden level is the whole problem. Those walls are old brick laid straight into sandy ground with nothing that would now be called a damp course, and they are below the level of the street on ground that sits a short walk from a river moving seven feet or more of tide twice a day. Masonry below grade wicks water upward continuously, and a below-grade room runs a few degrees cooler than the air in it, so moisture condenses out on exactly the surfaces a rug is lying on. Nothing about that is dramatic and nothing about it is visible: the pile feels dry to the hand while the cotton foundation underneath stays loaded, and the first honest signal is the smell of the room. Two things make it worse here. Party walls mean the house cannot cross-ventilate the way a detached house can, so what is damp stays damp. And a wool rug lying on original heart pine with moisture between the two marks both — a dark tannin line off the boards into the rug, and a shadow on the floor where the rug sat.
If that sounds like your rug, send the form and describe what you are seeing. We will tell you whether it needs the full treatment or not.
We collect from these too
Ready when you are, Historic District
Free inspection, free collection, and a real number before anything starts.