Archives for May 2008

On Saturday we got a chance to meet our new neighbors. You might remember that I mentioned them in one of my recent posts? We didn’t talk long as they were busy doing some work on their new house. They don’t plan on moving in until the first of July or so.

I don’t think that they plan to knock out walls like we did on our second day in our home, but they did say they were painting and redoing some of their floors.

While we were talking the new lady of the house, C, asked me if I could recommend a carpet cleaning company in the area. Our home is all hardwood floors so we haven’t used a local carpet cleaner however when we lived in our apartment we did have our carpets professionally cleaned a few times.

The first time we used a carpet cleaners services we had them do a very thorough cleaning of our carpets. My husband had used our area rug previously in his dorm room and it had a lot of stains on it.

A good carpet cleaner will not only offer a dry vacuum, but they’ll also offer spot removal, power scrubbing and steam extraction. Some companies even go so far as to offer a finishing service where they will fluff the carpets and even place pads under furniture to decrease the wear and tear on the carpet.

I also inquired if the carpet cleaning service that I used offered upholstery cleaning and they did, so I had them remove some stains on our loveseats. The material on the loveseats was a combination of silk and cotton or silk and rayon. I can’t remember the exact mix, but it was a delicate fabric. I was very pleased with how nice the loveseats looked when they were done. The loveseats were like new again. That stained area rug looked pretty good too.

Some carpet cleaners also offer pet odor control, carpet repair, area and oriental rug cleaning, drapery cleaning and fabric protection. Of course, most of the companies that provide residential services also offer commercial carpet cleaning too.

A few companies even offer tile and grout cleaning. Now that’s a great service to offer. I don’t know what your bathroom looks like, but we have really old tiles in our upstairs washroom and the grout looks terrible. Even though I don’t have carpets I might call in a carpet cleaner to have my drapes and grout cleaned!

I didn’t have any carpet cleaning companies to recommend to our new neighbors as I’d forgotten the name of the company that I’d used so long ago. As you can probably tell, I went online to look up some carpet cleaners in the Toronto area and that’s when I found out about all the different services that are available at some of the companies. After I did some research I was happy to pass on a few company names to our neighbors.

One thing I did learn as I looked for a carpet cleaner was that some offer Internet Specials. By this I mean you can get coupons or Internet discounts if you visit their web page prior to booking their service. So if you happen to be thinking of having your carpets, upholstery or drapes cleaned in the near future don’t forget to do an internet search and see if you can get a discount. You might as well save some money if you can.