If it has just happened, press a white towel dampened with cold water onto it and leave it at that. Rubbing spreads a spill and pushes it down to the backing. Hot water sets anything with protein in it, milk or blood for instance. Then ring us.
Stains by type
Treating a stain properly means knowing what it is, so we will ask. Tea, coffee, red wine and cola are tannin stains, and they respond to an acid spotter. Blood, milk, vomit and urine are protein, and take an enzyme product with cool water. Grease, lipstick, shoe polish and oily make-up need a solvent first, and water only afterwards. Candle wax lifts out with a warm iron and brown paper, the wax soaking up into the paper. Chewing gum is frozen hard and chipped off.
Dye stains are the hard ones. Ink, hair dye, turmeric and fake tan colour the fibre itself, and a big improvement is often the best anyone can do.
Marks that reappear
Sometimes a stain vanishes during the clean and turns up again a day later. That is wicking: part of the spill went down into the backing and the underlay, and as the pile dries from the top down it draws the residue back up to the tips. On the worst spots we extract slowly and lay a folded white towel with a weight on top, which pulls the last of it into the towel overnight. If a shadow still shows in the morning, blot it with a little cold water and it usually goes.
Beyond cleaning
Bleach and some acne creams strip dye, so the spot turns pale or orange. That colour is gone, and it needs a colour repair or a patch. Burns are similar. Red wine that has been heated, by a hire machine or a steam mop, can be fixed in for good, and so can a supermarket foam scrubbed hard into the pile. We look at every mark before we start and tell you which are likely to shift.
On the bill
The everyday marks come within the room price, so the coffee by the sofa costs nothing extra. A carpet with dozens of separate stains is priced on the walk round, before we begin, and a stain-only visit comes under the £67 minimum.
Sisal and seagrass halls, which turn up in a lot of Fulham houses, can’t take water, so stains on them are worked almost dry and results are limited. Tenants leaving a flat in late summer, when a lot of Fulham lets change hands, should ring a week or two ahead.
| Service | Price |
|---|---|
| Bedroom | £36 |
| Living room | £43 |
| Knock-through lounge | £61 |
| Stairs, per flight | £41 |
| Small rug (to 3m²) | £35 |
| Rug over 3m² | £51 |
| Carpet per bedroom, alongside an end of tenancy | £29 |
| Living room, with a move-out clean | £36 |
| Flight of stairs, alongside an end of tenancy | £35 |
The whole-room process is on the carpet cleaning page, marks on fabric are covered under sofa cleaning, and wool rugs have a page to themselves. For anything not in the table, check the full list.
Questions we get asked
Someone spilt red wine on a cream wool carpet last night. What now?
Dab it with cold water on a white cloth, working from the edge inwards, and leave the salt in the cupboard. Wool grabs tannin, but a fresh wine mark on wool usually comes out well with an acid spotter and a careful rinse. It is part of the £43 living room price.
Can you get dog urine out of the carpet?
The surface mark and most of the smell, usually. The trouble is the underlay. If the dog has used one spot for months, it has soaked right through, and a carpet clean reaches the pile, not the pad beneath. Pressing the pile and a sniff tell us how far it has spread, and we will say so before we start.
Is a stain on a sofa treated any differently?
The chemistry is the same and the fabric decides how far we go. A tannin mark on a W-coded cotton sofa gets the same spotter as on carpet, with less water. On pale linen we are more cautious, because too much moisture brings up a brown ring of its own. Ordinary marks are in the sofa price, £57 for a two-seater.
What happens with marks that don’t come out?
We tell you before we pack up what is left and why. Some are lost dye, some were set by heat, and some lighten a little more as the carpet finishes drying, so look again the next day.