In the world of interior design, countless hours of research and planning go into installing the perfect fabrics and floor coverings for an office or home. However, the same research and analysis isn’t always invested into how to best care for these fabrics. When the inevitable spilling and soiling occurs, many homeowners turn to an over-the-counter carpet and upholstery cleaner or take advice from an internet article.
The convenience and accessibility of these DIY solutions are undeniable, but the risks often go unnoticed. In this post, we will discuss the common pitfalls of popular home remedies for maintaining interior furnishings. Understanding these risks is not only about preserving the aesthetic appeal of your soft surfaces; it’s about ensuring their sustainability and vitality.
Vacuuming
Vacuuming is one of the easiest and most effective ways of ensuring that your fabrics and floor coverings endure the rigors of daily life. In fact, we recommend daily-use furnishings be vacuumed weekly. However, there are certain fabric, carpet, and rug types or constructions that require extra caution. For example, with boucle fabric or viscose rugs, a beater bar attachment should never be used, as it can cause pulls and shedding.
Water-Based Upholstery Cleaner and Methods
In some cases, it does not matter which products you use to spot clean upholstery fabrics or floor coverings; if it is water-based, it poses risks. This is true with many rayon fabric or rugs, linen fabric, cotton fabric, silk, velvet, sisal, and Tencel. There are an infinite number of combinations of fabrics, fiber types, constructions, colors, etc. that can make up a piece of furniture, meaning that no single upholstery cleaning solution or method is one size fits all. Many of you have probably noticed cleanability codes on your pieces that contain fabric care symbols meant to dictate which cleaning methods are safe to use. However, as we covered in a previous blog post, these codes are often unnecessarily conservative and unreliable.
The following DIY Cleaning methods are examples of both real-world issues that have occurred on our clients’ interior furnishings with water-based cleaners, as well as some in-house tests that we have conducted.
pH Level
This beige wool rug fell victim to a dog mistaking it for the backyard, where they were supposed to do their business. Rather than trusting a professional rug cleaning service, the owner turned to a popular over-the-counter carpet and upholstery cleaner, Folex. Because of its high pH level (10), the cleaner left several light spots on the rug, as wool is easily damaged by alkaline chemicals.
Bleeding
When using a water-based cleaner, bleeding is seldom considered as a risk. While not extremely common, this is something that can ruin a fabric for good. The risk of bleeding is exponentially increased when the upholstery fabric or floor covering contains natural fibers (i.e. wool, cotton, linen) and it has dark dyes, such as the dark blue seen in this photo. In this case, we used a mild detergent mixed with water. The truth is that any water-based detergent would have caused the dyes to bleed.
Bleeding
When using a water-based cleaner, bleeding is seldom considered as a risk. While not extremely common, this is something that can ruin a fabric for good. The risk of bleeding is exponentially increased when the upholstery fabric or floor covering contains natural fibers (i.e. wool, cotton, linen) and it has dark dyes, such as the dark blue seen in this photo. In this case, we used a mild detergent mixed with water. The truth is that any water-based detergent would have caused the dyes to bleed.
Buckling
Buckling is an issue that can occur due to several factors, almost all of which involve excess moisture. Carpet-cut-and-bound area rugs are especially prone to this kind of issue. Rugs with material backings, often made of latex or rubber, can also fall victim to buckling problems when exposed to too much moisture. In some rugs, all it takes is a small amount of water-based detergent to cause the rippling effect. The recent rise in popularity of wet-dry vacuums have made cleaning up spills easier on many consumers, but has greatly increased the risk of buckling their area rugs, illustrated in the example below.
Rayon Fabric & Rayon Rugs
Rayon fabric and floor coverings, otherwise known as viscose, have been a staple of interior design around the world for over a century. Much of this is due to its extremely soft and lustrous characteristics, making for an eye-catching furnishing in a showroom. However, rayon fabric comes with several drawbacks that make caring for it more difficult than almost any other fiber.
Aside from its vulnerability to shedding and lack of resistance to foot traffic, most issues with rayon fabric arise from moisture. Allowing any type of moisture to set into the fibers of a rayon fabric or floor covering can lead to yellowing, shrinking, or shading issues.
This viscose rug may look like it endured a coffee spill or a dog urine spot, when in fact this spot was created simply by a glass of water that spilled. The owner didn’t think much of it and figured it would dry perfectly fine. As you can see, the fibers turned an ugly shade of yellow that will be incredibly difficult to correct.
While a rayon rug or rayon velvet upholstery can crush with general use, getting the fibers wet will greatly speed up the process. As you can see from this clip, a small amount of water almost immediately soaks into the fibers, which are easily crushed by light pressing.
Bleach Fabric Cleaner
The internet is full of recommendations to use cleaning solutions that involve bleaching agents. There are soft surfaces that are able to withstand a bleach solution, including certain synthetic performance upholstery fabrics. Still, bleach always poses the risk of color loss. Inherently, the main characteristic of bleach is that it removes color from any object. So unless you want to risk taking color out of your soft surfaces for good, we recommend leaving any bleaching to professional area rug cleaners.
A bleach solution was used to spot clean this sisal rug, permanently removing color from the fibers.
Trust the Professional Cleaners
There are a number of effective DIY carpet and upholstery cleaner solutions for spot cleaning your interior furnishings that have their place in the world. That said, a simple ‘how to clean an area rug’ or ‘best upholstery cleaner’ internet search is never the answer when it comes to removing spots on your furnishings. It is impossible for a single internet blog to encompass every possible spot on any given fabric or floor covering. This is why in most cases it is best to rely on professional cleaning and fabric protection services to safeguard your investment in interior furnishings.
