Carpet Cleaning in Handsworth

Angular pavement grit walked straight onto the hall carpet

Pavement grit is the local material and it behaves badly. It is angular, so it cuts the pile as people walk it in, and fine enough to travel down to the backing where nothing domestic will lift it. On a mid-terrace it arrives in a strip: threshold, hall, first flight, landing, in that order, while the bedrooms stay comparatively untouched. In a divided house that same strip absorbs the footfall of several tenancies at once. Add that many of these carpets were fitted cheaply by an owner, not chosen by a household, and you have a floor covering looking tired long before its age would suggest.

• Front doors opening onto the footway, with no path or porch to take the grit off first
• Two flights of stairs in a three-storey house, both carrying the whole property’s traffic
• Angular street grit that cuts the pile and settles down against the backing
• Thin landlord-fit carpet in licensed lets, where wear shows up well ahead of dirt
• Halls in divided houses taking the footfall of several tenancies across one strip of floor

A long dry vacuum before any moisture touches the pile

We test the fibre and the dye out of sight first, which matters more on cheap contract carpet than on anything a household chose. Then a long dry vacuum, because most of what comes out of these floors is dry grit and wetting it first would only make a paste of it. Pre-spray is laid down and left to work before anything is agitated in. Both flights are done tread by tread with a hand tool, spending the extra minutes on the nosings. In a mid-terrace drying is the limiting factor, so we open up at both ends and leave the hall until last.

• A long dry vacuum before any moisture, because the soil here is grit more than grease
• Both flights worked tread by tread, with extra minutes spent on the nosings
• Hose run in from the street and kept flat, since there is nowhere nearer to stop
• Doors open at both ends to move air, as a mid-terrace has no cross draught otherwise

More detail on the equipment and the order of work: our carpet cleaning method.

Halls, stairs and void carpets in B21

On a let, carpets fit best at a changeover alongside the void clean, so the house is unlocked once and the carpets go in at the very end, after everything else is finished. An empty property is also the easiest place to clean them: nothing to shift, and the doors free to stand open all afternoon. Owner-occupied houses on the streets bordering the park suit a yearly clean of the hall, both flights and the front room. Offices and function rooms off the Soho Road can be booked too. Handsworth is covered on set days, so booking ahead is the way to secure one.

Set-up on a terrace, and why one room is poor value

We charge by the room and by the staircase, with a minimum charge that covers getting set up, and setting up on a terrace means carrying the machine in from wherever the van could stop, with no drive to wheel it off. That is why a single room is poor value here: the hall, both flights and the front room together costs far less than those three booked separately across a year. Where soiling is heavy, or a particular stain needs its own treatment, that is extra time and it goes into the quote. There is also a limit and we name it before you book. Extraction pulls out a startling quantity of grit, but a nosing already walked through comes back cleaner and still worn.

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At each void, and yearly for the hall and both flights

One clean per tenancy on a let, done at the void, and read the agreement first because some Handsworth tenancies make it a condition. Households on the quieter streets sit comfortably at twelve to eighteen months overall, dropping to annual for the hall and stairs alone, since that strip absorbs most of the footfall on a small fraction of the floor area. A room-by-room let with a shared hall wants two visits a year.