Red Hot Red Wine

My days can seem a bit monotone some days, I come to work, check e-mails, call clients to let them know their rugs are ready for pick up, write a blog or do other online work. It is the variety of phone calls, area rugs and clients that make each day just that much more interesting.

Take today, Sat May 28, at 8am on the dot the phone rings, I think wow we just opened they must have been waiting for the time to be 8am to call.

I was wrong, he needed to know when he could bring in his rug for cleaning today and it was a fluke on the timing.

The guy on the phone said that he woke up this morning to a red wine spill and dog urine on his rug. Not the best things to wake up to, especially when you did not cause either of them to happen.

The arrows show where the red wine mostly is and the darker areas are where the rug is wet.

He said that he took his rug out on the patio and tented it over two chairs and poured a very diluted mix of liquid laundry soap and warm water through the rug to get the wine out.

Not the best recommended red wine treatment. The water is fine, but it should have been cold not warm in case the dye was not stable and the laundry soap if not rinsed completely out would leave a residue and attract dirt.

Blotting the spot with a dry white cotton towel, pouring table salt or dry oats on the spill works better. If you own a wet vac and the spill is wet this works best. When a wet spill or accident occurs you need to get it off the rug. When you scrub or add more moisture to the spill you are pushing the original spill deeper into the fibers making it a more permanent stain.

He just brought the rug in to our office for cleaning and it is an 8x10 wool Chobi rug. It is a beautiful rug that his boss bought in Istanbul and that he just recently inherited from said boss. The wine stain is pretty big and is all the way through the rug. The people who spilled the wine had tried to clean it up themselves and ended up spreading it more. The couple were getting amorous and the wine glass got knocked over. Oops kind of a major mood killer.

I am confident that Luv-A-Rug can remove most of the wine stain. There may still be some pile distortion from the scrubbing done, but that will look like a shadow on the rug.

I couldn't help but smile as the two guys were talking about how the wine spill happened. What a horrible mood breaker- spilling wine on your buddies rug. Wine spills happen no matter how careful you are or how little wine is in the glass.

The urine came from the rug owners girlfriends little Chihuahua. I guess he felt that since the rug already had a spill on it he would just add to it.  The urine was recent and it got soaked up quickly and is the least of the rug owners worries. having the rug look new again is his main concern. He did a good thing in keeping the area damp, this helps the wine not completely set into the fibers and bringing in the rug right away for cleaning.

When you have a wet spill happen on your rug, whether it be wine, urine or other liquids, the best thing to do is not panic and grab the nearest spot remover, but to use a white towel and soak up what you can and then take another white towel get it damp and keep the spill moist until you can get it professionally taken care of.

On Vancouver Island and Victoria, BC you can call Luv-A-Rug at 250-590-6210/ 1-800-886-2802 and we can arrange pick up of your rug or you can bring it to us at 445 Beta St, off Alpha St.

Here is to many sober rugs, RugloverMary