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
Roughly two hundred and thirty blocks either side of Market Street between the river and Seventeenth, listed on the National Register in 1974 and one of the largest historic districts in the state. Late-Georgian and antebellum townhouses, Italianate and Queen Anne stock from the 1870s onward, and a great many raised frame houses standing on brick piers over open or half-closed crawlspaces, with wide heart-pine boards laid straight onto the joists.
Owner-occupiers who take the fabric of the house seriously, apartments carved out of larger houses, and a steady number of short lets in the blocks near Front Street. Good rugs are common here, and nearly all of them lie on bare board rather than over carpet.
The Historic District problem
In a raised historic house the rug's worst enemy is the space underneath it. A brick-pier crawlspace is open to Cape Fear air that spends most of the summer close to saturation, the ground beneath it is damp sand, and old heart-pine boards laid tight over joists are not a vapour barrier — they are a slow one. Moisture arrives at the underside of the rug all summer while the room above is being cooled, which makes the back of the rug the coldest surface in the room and the place water chooses to sit. The pile stays dry to the hand while the cotton foundation quietly loads up underneath. Two things follow from that. Old cut nails, floor grates and cast-iron registers start printing rust into a damp foundation, and those marks are in the fibre rather than on it. And the blocks nearest Water Street sit only a few feet above a river that is still tidal and brackish this far up, so a high tide stacked on a hard rain pushes water back through the storm drains into ground-floor rooms — not a wall of it, an inch or two, shrugged off on the day and left in the rug.
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.