Rug cleaning
in Milpitas.

Milpitas sends us two different kinds of rug, and the reason is in its housing. Sunnyhills opened in 1956 as one of the first planned racially integrated subdivisions in the United States, developed with the United Auto Workers and the American Friends Service Committee for people working at the Ford plant on the flats below. Those single-story houses are seventy years old now, and what leaves them is usually one wool rug that has held the same square of floor for decades. Around Midtown, the city’s oldest commercial blocks, the pattern is much the same. The other Milpitas is newer. Ford stopped building cars here in 1983, the plant reopened as the Great Mall in 1994, and the BART station near Montague Expressway opened in June 2020. From the townhouses and stacked flats we collect in that part of the city, the rugs are frequently hand-tufted rather than hand-knotted: pile glued into a fabric backing with latex that hardens and powders as it ages, so the rug sheds a fine white dust and the backing starts to lift away. Heat and hard agitation make that worse. We wash cold, by full immersion, and dry the rug flat at the workshop instead of tumbling it. Knotted pieces get the same twelve-step wash, which leaves the lanolin in the wool and the vegetable dyes where the weaver put them.

Booking is by phone or text on (650) 675-8160; someone answers from 8am until 8pm, seven days a week. We agree a collection window with you at booking and confirm it within a day. Two of us come for anything room-size, so the rug is lifted rather than dragged. The same team dusts it, washes it and returns it; nothing is handed to a courier.