Rug cleaning
in Menlo Park.

Here the useful question is which side of the flood map a house sits on. The city’s own neighborhood profiles put about three-quarters of The Willows west of Menalto Avenue inside a flood hazard area, and roughly fifteen percent of the streets east of it. That matters for a rug on a board floor above a crawl space. When water has been through a room we run the piece through full immersion rather than a surface clean, dry it flat under moving air, and write the damage up with photographs in a form an insurer will accept. Up in Sharon Heights, laid out in the 1960s on the six-hundred-acre estate the Sharon family once held, the city records no flood hazard at all and few accessible sidewalks, so the van parks on the drive and the rug is carried out rolled. Belle Haven and the streets near the Bayfront send us more machine-made and synthetic pieces; Allied Arts and Central Menlo send the older hand-knotted ones, some of them bought a few hundred yards away when the Allied Arts Guild still had a working weaving studio. The wash does not change: twelve steps, cold water, lanolin left in the wool, vegetable dyes undisturbed, enzymatic pre-treatment where a pet has been. We do the collecting, the washing and the return ourselves.

A call or a text to (650) 675-8160 reaches us from 8am to 8pm, seven days. You pick the slot, the office holds it, and someone rings to verify before the van sets out. If a rug has been standing in water, say so at the point of booking: we bring it in flat rather than rolled and start the documentation the same day. Everything is washed at our Newark workshop by the people who collected it.