Upholstery Cleaning Extends the Life of Your Furniture
Published on Tuesday, 21 August 2012
A popular overlooked task when managing a home is upholstery cleaning. Many people do vacuum their furniture weekly and use an antibacterial spray on the fabric, but these solutions won't exactly extend the life of the furniture. A piece of furniture is expensive investment and on average people keep it for about 10 years, before buying new one. However, this would be impossible without some upholstery cleaning now and then.
The padding and fabric of each piece of furniture absorbs debris and dirt quite quickly. Every time you sit on it or your pet walks over it, it gets dirtier. Having children increases that considerably as well. Moreover, you need to take care of furniture that your child sits on, since a dirty place causes allergies. Within a couple of years, the fabric begins to fade and the overall look becomes slightly dull. Upholstery cleaning services offer professional help, which ensures a longer life for your furniture. If you can afford it, having your furniture cleaned by a team of experts once a month will surely save your furniture. The commercial steam cleaners clean the fabric at its deepest level and this makes them more powerful than home steam cleaners. If you want really clean furniture, you should hire a professional. The frequency of upholstery cleaning depends on how often do you use it and how. If you have several children or you often have guests, the cleaning should be done every 5 to 7 months. If you have an office or a medical office, the cleaning needs to be done once a month to prevent bacteria from spreading. Upholstery cleaning is much more efficient than doing it yourself. Upholstery cleaning services offer other types of cleaning as well: curtains or carpets. You can check their services and have it all done altogether. They offer cleaning for both residential and commercial properties.
There are a few areas of concern when one decides to do upholstery cleaning on their own. First of all, the fabric shouldn't get too wet. Even if you think that more water will help you remove more stains, this is a wrong method. Moisture is every fabric's biggest enemy. You should try to presoak the stains with a mild fabric cleaner, before you put any water on top of it. If you are cleaning a chair or a sofa, beware of getting the metal portions wet as they may rust. Cleaning a chair is not such a hard task, but you need to know what kind of fabric you are dealing with. Synthetic fibers are easy to clean without destroying the colour itself. However, if the cushions consist of more than 50% of cotton, you should have them professionally cleaned as these fabrics need special chemicals. It's quite easy to ruin a fabric when you don't know how to clean it properly. Avoid using vinegar or other acids, because these ruin the fiber. A simple method you can use when cleaning upholstery yourself is baby wipes. You'd be surprised at how much they can do. They don't consist of much soap or water, but just enough to remove stains and dirt. One last suggestion is that you must know the fabric you are going to clean. This information was provided by the manufacturer when purchasing the piece of material. Many materials and combinations of two materials will shrunk if you steam clean them for instance, so you need to know what the fabric requires.
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