How Do I Prepare for a Professional Carpet Cleaning?
Moving small furniture when carpet cleaning isn’t a big deal, such as coffee tables, ottomans, and similar items. But what about your sofa set? How about the china cabinet or the beds?
Do you need to move furniture in order to get a quality carpet cleaning? In this article, we’ll talk about when to move furniture and best practices when doing so.
When NOT to Move Furniture
90% of the time it’s not necessary to carpet clean under your furniture. For example, if your sofa set has stayed where it’s been for a while and no foot traffic has crossed the carpet underneath it, you don’t need to carpet clean that area.
At best you can use a vacuum floor attachment and suck up a lot of surface dust that’s collected.
Foot traffic that happens in open spaces is what causes human oils to mesh into the fibers and push soil deeper into the carpet. Open spaces are also more prone to liquid spills and messes. In essence your furniture acts as a shield for your carpet against potential spots and dirt, so a full carpet cleaning isn’t necessary.
When to Move Furniture
The only time you should consider moving your furniture before carpet cleaning is if you’ve recently rearranged your furniture to cover an area with previous high traffic.
For example, your living room couch set has been set against the walls in a “C” shape, but you decide to move the love seat to the middle of the room to separate it from your dining room, so you move the love seat away from the wall and place it in a high traffic area.
In this case it makes sense to move the loveseat prior to a carpet cleaning if you didn’t have it cleaned before moving it. Ultimately as long as there’s no spills or soil underneath the furniture, you shouldn’t have to worry about moving it.
If you decide to have the carpets underneath your furniture cleaned anyway, we recommend going with a simple steam extraction with no pretreatment. This will still give your carpets a good disinfectant and help remove any remaining dust or soil that the vacuum didn’t get.
Using too much water dejection from a Rug Doctor machine or other self-carpet cleaner will keep the carpet from drying quickly and could turn into a haven for mold growth. The same concern can arise from using a self-cleaner that doesn’t have enough lift power to remove most of the moisture out of the carpet.
How to Safely Move Furniture Prior to Cleaning
Before attempting to move any furniture prior to a carpet cleaning, make sure you follow the safety precautions below:
- Tape any loose doors shut
Use painters tape to keep any cabinets or drawers shut in place during the moving process. Don’t try to move organizational furniture like china cabinets or bookshelves with items still in them. Take the extra time to remove items from the shelves before moving the furniture. - Ask a friend to help
If you can find a second person to help you move, this can help you avoid any possible injuries to your body that can happen due to overstrain.
If you don’t have a second person and you have to move it alone, use the One-50 Rule of moving furniture, which is simply moving one side of a heavy piece of furniture at a time which is 50% of the furniture’s actual weight. Don’t try pushing or pulling furniture from the center, as you’ll be trying to move 100% of the weight.
Use furniture sliders
Before trying to scoot any furniture, make sure you place furniture sliders under each leg. Furniture sliders remove friction from the carpet and make it possible to easily move just about any large or heavy piece of furniture.
When’s a Good Time to Move it Back?
When to move your furniture back after a carpet cleaning depends on the quality of the carpet cleaning itself.
If you’re using a RugDoctor carpet cleaner or any other self-cleaner, it can take more than 24 hours to a couple of days for the carpet to dry enough until there’s no concerns of mold growth occurring depending on the level of water dejection you used and how much moisture was able to be lifted out.
If you’re using a professional steam carpet cleaning service, the dry time can be less than 2 hours if the carpeted area wasn’t a high traffic spot (we would focus on just steam extractions) and 4-6 hours if we’re doing a pre-treatment.
If you want to speed up the dry time even more, you can purchase affordable box fans online and point the air flow toward your carpets to decrease the drying time.
Using the Best Carpet Cleaning Approach
At Always Green Carpet Cleaner, we use industrial machinery that provides a deep carpet cleaning experience and fast dry time so you’re not waiting days before moving your furniture back in place.
Our water dejection (or PSI = pounds of water per square inch) is much more controlled and our water weight lift is powerful enough to remove up to 25 pounds of water without missing a beat.
This means higher dry time and no stressing out about the dry time before moving your furniture back again. This kind of quality simply can’t be matched with “do-it-yourself” carpet cleaner rentals.
For a free quote, please reach out to our friendly team for a non-obligation proposal, and let us help you get your carpets cleaned the right way!
