It’s the age old service company frustration. As a homeowner myself I am as guilty of it as everyone else. You mess something up, you try to fix it yourself, you make the problem worse… and then you call in the professionals. So now the professionals have to deal with the original issue, the additional issue that you have created, and still walk out the superstars – because don’t we all expect that they’re going to fix everything and make it better?! They are the professionals after all…
Unfortunately, this is often not how it ends up. And this was the case on a carpet cleaning we did today. This is a picture of a normally dirty carpet, but with some very noticeable stains, which the customer expected we would be able to remove. That is why he called us.
This was an Airbnb rental gone bad… The owner said that there was some kind of a drug addict in here, and the technician said he has no idea what the stain was from, but it was pink and slippery. I am putting a few pictures here for context, but he said the place was trashed.
As you can see by the two pictures here, someone used a product to try and clean some of the spots, which is why they light up like this under the black light.
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That same person just scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed and scrubbed until the carpet fibers started to tear. (Which begs the question why – if they left the place so trashed – did they feel the need to scrub this one spot.) So now we have a stain of unknown origin, which has been locked in by the use of some unknown chemical that was not properly rinsed, and severe pile damage which is permanent. This was the textbook worst thing this person could do.
Here is a side-by-side before and after photo. We were able to make some definite improvement on it but it was exactly what we expected.
These are the lessons that we can learn from our poor customer’s drug addict Airbnb guest.
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Do not put an over-the-counter product on your carpeting. I really can’t think of a situation when you should.
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And do not apply pressure and scrub it to death.
The best thing you can do is absorb as much of the substance as you can with a clean towel, and then rinse it with water and absorb that as well. If you can’t get it out with water, you should probably call us. (Most people don’t know that water alone is a pretty decent cleaner and won’t damage your fibers.)
Happy Cleaning!
Andrea
