Caring For Your Hand-Knotted Area Rug in SW Florida

Hand-knotted rugs are beautiful and designed to last a lifetime. To keep them in tip-top shape, here are some “rules of the road” to follow to ensure they’ll last for generations.

Oriental Rug Salon is SW Florida’s largest and most experienced Oriental, wool and silk area rug cleaning and repair facility. We clean and repair thousands of rugs annually and following is a list of “do’s and don’ts” to protect your area rug and ensure it outlasts you.

Rugs Fade in Sunlight. Be Careful!

Sunlight can be the “kiss of death” for many hand-knotted rugs. After inspecting thousands of area rugs in many homes and in our shop over the years, we have seen beautiful wool and silk area rugs permanently faded due to prolonged sunlight exposure through windows and sliders.

Sunlight streaming through a window directly onto a rug is virtually guaranteed to harm it, whether morning or afternoon, southern or western sunlight. Naturally dyed rugs and synthetic rugs suffer equally. Colors fade unevenly and wool and cotton dry out and become brittle.

You can eliminate or prevent this problem by keeping the curtains closed, adjust shades accordingly or by having your windows professionally coated with Mylar (an invisible film which can be applied to your windows that filters out harmful ultraviolet light).

Moths

The second major enemy of Oriental rugs is moths and insects. The moths you need to worry about are small and hardly noticeable. They are the same moths that raid food in the pantry and wool clothes in the closet. They do their damage in the larval stage when, as little maggot looking creatures, they eat tracks in wool rugs. In rugs with wool foundations, they often eat right through the rug, leaving behind a web-like material. Moths can cause devastating damage to a rug in a matter of weeks.

Rugs or portions of rugs covered by furniture must be disturbed from time to time to prevent moths from settling in. That means moving furniture off them every several months or so and vacuuming or sweeping. When inspecting rugs for moth activity, remember that most moth damage is to the back of a rug where moths are least likely to be disturbed. So examine the back of the rug along its perimeter and look for moths, moth larvae or the casing or webbing they leave behind.

Mildew and Dry Rot

When rugs stay wet or are exposed to moisture too long, they become mildewed and eventually suffer dry rot. The classic example is dry rot caused by a potted plant placed on a rug. The typical result is a horribly rotted circular area in a carpet that is otherwise in good condition. Don’t even think about putting a potted plant on a rug. No matter how clever you are, no matter that you use a glazed pot and a glazed saucer and you put a vapor barrier between the saucer and the rug, the rug will get wet and will stay wet unbeknownst to you and will become a rotten mess in an area about one foot in diameter.

Unfortunately, besides causing mildew and dry rot, water sometimes causes dyes in rugs to bleed or run. All you can do in this situation is to get the area rug dry as soon as possible and contact Oriental Rug Salon for professional treatment.

How To Keep Your Oriental Rugs Clean

Rugs gradually wear as they are walked on. That can’t be avoided, but you can lessen the problem by turning or rotating your rugs from time to time so they don’t always get walked on in the same places. Walking on a dirty rug shortens its life prematurely. Dirt and sand fragments act like sandpaper as you grind them into the surface of your rug.

How often should you have your Oriental rugs washed? On the average of every four or five years, but the real answer is that you should wash them when they are dirty and not before or long after.

You can tell whether your rug is dirty by testing it with a white, wet cloth. Rub the rug’s pile vigorously with the wet cloth and check to see how much dirt is transferred to the cloth. Don’t worry about a little discoloration; any rug has a little dust on its surface. A dirty rug will transfer a lot of dirt to a cloth, and the results of your testing will be unambiguous.

Should you use rug pads?

Absolutely! A quality area rug pad will prevent the area rug, and you, from slipping across a tiled or wood floor. An area rug pad helps absorb shock when the rug is walked on, prevents bunching and twisting and enhances the feel of the area rug when walking on it barefooted.

Oriental Rug Salon sells custom quality area rug padding that in addition to the above, is hand-cut to fit your area rug perfectly. Our area rug padding has been treated with a mothproofing agent and will support the area rug while promoting a rich, luxurious feel.

Oriental Rug Salon is a Certified Partner with the prestigious Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification (IICRC) and the international Carpet & Rug Institute (CRI). We are A+ rated by the Better Business Bureau and Angie’s List and our technicians are experts in all textile types.

For more information on Oriental Rug Salon please visit us online at www.OrientalRugSalon.com or call us anytime at 239-424-8171.

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A rug weaver spent months or years handcrafting your beautiful hand-knotted area rug. Pamper it with a salon treatment every four years, keep it away from direct sunlight, watch out for moths and never place plants on top of it. Your area rug will pay you back with beauty guaranteed to last a lifetime.

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Caring For Your Hand-Knotted Area Rug in SW Florida

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