Carpet Cleaning in Los Angeles, CA

Frequently Asked Questions

1. My traffic lanes have gone gray even though the rest of the carpet looks fine. Can that come back?

   Usually a good amount of it, yes. In Los Angeles the soil in those lanes is mostly dry and gritty: road dust, brake dust off the boulevards, diesel soot that drifts in through windows and door gaps. It's abrasive, and it packs down into the pile right where people walk. If we get to it before the fibers are physically worn, a dry pass followed by hot water extraction with a pre-spray on the lanes lifts most of the gray. If the carpet is older builder-grade olefin and the lane has already been scuffed shiny, the color improves but the texture change is permanent. We'll tell you which one you're looking at before we start rather than after.

2. I'm in an interior apartment unit with no cross-ventilation. How long will the carpet stay wet?

   Longer than it would in a unit with windows on two sides, which is most of the housing stock question we get in the denser parts of the city. LA air is dry and that works in your favor, but a middle unit with one window and a window AC has nowhere for the moisture to go. We bring air movers and run them after extraction, and we'll ask you to leave the AC going and any door to a hallway or balcony cracked if the building allows it. With forced air it's typically dry the same day. Without it, in a sealed interior unit, you can be looking at twice that and a musty smell, so we don't skip the fans.

3. What actually drives the cost up or down on an LA job?

   Access is the biggest variable here, more than square footage. A single-story postwar stucco house with a driveway is straightforward. A third-floor unit in a 1970s dingbat with no elevator, street parking only, and a long hose run from the truck takes more setup time, and that shows up in the number. Beyond that: how long since the last cleaning, whether the traffic lanes need a separate pre-treatment, and whether we're cleaning shared stairs and corridor carpet along with the unit. Turnover cleaning on a small empty apartment is at the low end of what we do. Occupied homes with furniture to work around sit higher.

4. Can you come out the same day?

   Sometimes, and more often for apartments than houses. Small unit turnovers fit into gaps in the schedule, so if you call in the morning about a vacant one-bedroom there's a reasonable chance. Larger occupied homes, or jobs with area rugs that need to be handled separately, generally need a day or two of notice. Crossing the city at the wrong hour is its own problem, so an afternoon slot on the other side of town is harder to promise than a morning one. Call and we'll tell you what's actually open.

5. We have original oak floors with area rugs in our 1920s bungalow. Do you clean rugs in place?

   Not on top of old oak, no. Older floors in these houses often have finish that has worn thin or lifted at the seams, and moisture getting under a rug and sitting there is how you get cupping and dark staining in the boards. For wool or hand-knotted rugs we take them off-site. For synthetic rugs in decent shape we can sometimes clean them on a hard surface like a patio or garage slab and dry them fully before they go back down. Either way the floor underneath gets a chance to breathe, and we'd rather move the rug than gamble with a hundred-year-old floor.