Rug cleaning
in Colma.

Colma is 1.9 square miles holding 1,507 residents, and 17 cemeteries occupy roughly 73 percent of that ground. The residential part is therefore small and specific. Almost all of it is Sterling Park, where about 260 ranch-style homes went up from 1950 on land that had been the Rosaia Ranch; veterans bought many of them for $8,950 on GI loans. Ranch plans of that year run flat and long. One story, a living room that opens into a dining end, and no stair between the front door and the street. A nine-by-twelve suits the main room and a runner suits the hall, and the level ground means we carry a rug out flat instead of turning it on a landing. A second pocket of houses sits on Hillside Boulevard below Lawndale, with flats and offices along Mission Road and the El Camino Real frontage. Homes held by one family for seventy years produce a particular kind of rug: grit driven down to the foundation, ends bleached where the sun crosses the room, old rings left by spot cleaning. A vacuum reaches the top third of a pile and no further. The twelve-step cold-water immersion wash reaches the rest, and cold water leaves the lanolin in the wool rather than stripping it. Vegetable-dyed pieces are bleed-tested before they go near the wash pit. Collection and return cost nothing.

Phone or text (650) 675-8160 to start. Someone answers from 8am to 8pm every day of the week, and we hold a window for you before a van is assigned. The confirmation follows inside a day. Colma’s residential grid is compact, so we agree the nearest cross street at booking and park where the carry is shortest. The people who wash your rug are the ones who collect it, record its condition in photographs, roll it and bring it home.