Rug cleaning
in East Palo Alto.

This is the shortest run we make anywhere on the Peninsula. Route 84 comes off the Dumbarton and touches down at Ravenswood Point, right on the city’s northern boundary, so a rug collected in the morning is on the wash floor the same afternoon. The housing tells its own story. Farms covered most of this ground into the 1940s, and in the 1950s they were built over quickly with single-story houses, so much of what we collect from the Gardens, University Village and Woodland sits on a concrete slab only a few feet above the bay. Slab floors hold cold and hold damp, and a rug left on one through a wet winter will smell of it long before it looks wrong. We wash cold and in full immersion so the wool releases that moisture and keeps its lanolin, then dry flat rather than hot. In Weeks, where the city’s Local Register of Historic Resources rests on a 1994 survey of fifty-two properties, the houses are older and the rugs older with them; those get hand work on fringes and side cords before anything else happens. Down at Cooley Landing the salt air is a constant, and a rug that lives near an open door wants washing more often than one that does not. Collection and return are free.

Booking is a call or a text to (650) 675-8160, answered 8am to 8pm every day, and the window is agreed with you before anything is scheduled; a short call or text the following day settles it. Parking is tight on some of the older streets, so tell us where a van can stand and whether there is a gate. The two people who carry the rug out are the two who bring it back, and the wash happens in Newark.