Persian, oriental, wool and silk — washed by hand, repaired by hand.
This city sits between a tidal river and the Atlantic, takes something near fifty-seven inches of rain a year, and turns half its beach living rooms over to new guests every Saturday from spring to autumn. Rugs here are damaged by all three of those things and almost never by ordinary walking. They are collected, washed off site by hand, dried flat, and brought back.
A hand-knotted Tabriz and a printed polyester rug from a big-box aisle are not the same object and must never meet the same brush. Vegetable dyes bleed. Silk scorches. Viscose sold as bamboo silk turns to wet paper. A cotton foundation shrinks if it is pulled out of the wash and dried under tension. Every one of those is permanent, and every one of them comes from guessing.
So the first thing that happens to a rug is not water. It is an inspection: fibre content, dye stability, weave and backing, previous repairs, and whatever the last few Cape Fear summers have left down in the foundation where you cannot see it. Only then does it get a method. That inspection costs nothing, it happens before you commit to anything, and if a rug is not worth the cost of cleaning we will tell you that instead of taking the work.
Wool, silk, cotton, jute and synthetics each get their own water temperature, pH and agitation.
Chewed corners, unravelling fringe, beetle grazing and split foundations rebuilt by hand.
Creek water, storm water and the smell of a rug that never dried out are treated in the foundation.
We collect and return across New Hanover and Brunswick counties. You never lift a roll.
Washing, structural repair, and getting water back out of a rug before the foundation goes.
Full immersion hand-washing for Persian, oriental, wool, silk, cotton and modern synthetic rugs. Dry grit is taken out before any water is introduced, then the rug is washed and flushed until the water runs clear — which is also the only way to get old detergent residue back out of a pile.
Rug cleaning detailsFringe replacement, edge binding, insect grazing, pet destruction, worn pile and missing corners. Reweaving is done with matched wool at matched knot density, so the repair settles into the field instead of announcing itself from across the room.
Repair servicesA creek that came up over the yard, a roof that let go in a named storm, or a supply line behind a washing machine. Rugs in that state need flushing and controlled drying rather than a fan and hope. We extract, decontaminate, dry flat, and document the condition throughout.
Water damage service
Rug care advice written for a dry inland house quietly fails here. Wilmington is one of the wetter cities in the country: around fifty-seven inches of precipitation a year, and unlike a monsoon climate it is spread across every single month, so there is no dry season in which anything catches up. Summer dew points sit in the mid-seventies for weeks, hurricane season runs June through November, and the county has water on three sides of it — ocean, sound and a tidal river with fresh blackwater swamps feeding in behind.
A few of the soaked rugs on this coast met a named storm. Most of them met a supply line behind a washing machine, a water heater at the end of its life, an air handler with a blocked condensate drain sitting in a hot attic, or a slider that lost an argument with wind-driven rain. Water that starts clean is rarely still clean when it reaches the rug, because it has crossed a floor to get there.
Flood water is its own category, and around here it comes in two flavours that need two different answers. Brackish tidal water backing out of the storm drains downtown carries silt and whatever was in the street. Fresh blackwater off the swamps west of the river is stained with tannin and mildly acidic, and tannin sets into warm wool like the dye it is. Either way what decides the outcome is what happens next. A wet wool foundation is a growing medium, and in this climate the room is always warm enough to help it along. Drying the surface with a fan leaves the contamination exactly where it is and produces a rug that seems fine for three weeks and then does not. The rug has to be flushed, treated, and dried flat with the moisture content actually measured — and photographed before any of that, because that is what an insurer asks for.
Off-site washing, hand finishing, and a route that runs from Southport and Leland out to Figure Eight.
From Southport and Leland across the river, through the Historic District and Forest Hills, out to Wrightsville, Carolina and Kure beaches, and north through Ogden to Porters Neck and Figure Eight. Collection is included.
One hand-knotted Persian rug, photographed before and after cleaning.
Send the form and we will come back with a real number. Estimates are free and there is no obligation to book.
How rugs are actually built, how to tell hand-knotted from tufted in ten seconds, and what any of it means for a house on the Cape Fear coast.
Free estimate, collection and delivery included — anywhere on the route.
