Monticello is a crossroads community up SC-215 in Fairfield County, at the north end of Monticello Reservoir, with four places on the National Register of Historic Places: the old Monticello Store and Post Office, Monticello Methodist Church, and the Davis and Fonti Flora plantations. Families here have been in the same houses for generations, and so have their furniture and rugs.
That's who calls us from Monticello. Somebody inherited Grandmother's dining room rug, or the parlor sofa that has been reupholstered once since 1960, and they want it cleaned by someone who won't ruin it.
Heirloom rugs, cleaned where they lie
We clean oriental rugs and other hand-knotted pieces in your home. Nobody rolls your rug onto a truck and drives it to a warehouse. For an old rug, that's a real advantage, because every trip and every fold is a chance to crack a dry foundation or lose a fringe.
Before anything gets wet, the tech looks at the rug closely. Wool or silk? Are the dyes stable? Older vegetable dyes can bleed, so we test a hidden spot first. A rug with dry rot, moth damage, or a dye we have doubts about gets left alone, and we'll tell you why. Some rugs need a restoration specialist, and pretending otherwise would be doing you a disservice.
For rugs that can be cleaned, our method uses very little moisture and no soap. Soap residue is what makes old rugs feel stiff and look dull after a bad cleaning. We'd argue that residue does more damage over the years than the dirt does.
Old upholstery
Same principle on the furniture. Our upholstery cleaning starts with a check of the fabric tag, or a test patch if there isn't one, since older pieces often have fabric nobody can identify anymore. Velvet gets handled one way and old cotton damask another, and a few pieces we'll recommend you send to a specialist.
The tech quotes the full job before starting, so there are no surprises.
A word on the drive
Monticello is about as far north as we regularly go. We come up through Jenkinsville from the Broad River side, so give us a road and a landmark; out here, the church or the old store usually does the trick. Rural mailing addresses up here don't always match the community name on the map, so the landmark helps more than the zip code.
Call 803-310-3848, and look at the current coupons first. Rugs and upholstery each have $25 off.