Cleaning Upholstery – What You Should Know

When it comes to deep cleaning your home, the floors and countertops get most of the attention. But what about your upholstery? Many people will take time to vacuum their upholstered furniture… but that doesn’t deep clean it. So, what do you do? Before cleaning upholstery there is a very important step. IDENTIFY the type of fabric!

Incorrectly Identifying Fabric

The thing is, upholstered furniture is available in a slew of different types of fabrics! Fabric is made up of fibers, and every type of fiber will react to solution in a different way.  

When it comes to cleaning upholstery, incorrectly identifying fabric happens to be one of the biggest mistakes both die-hard DIYers and inexperienced service technicians make! Which, unfortunately, can cost thousands of dollars to repair or replace.

Here are some of the common mistakes:

  • Damaging polished cotton and removing the shine by using the wrong solution

  • To clean silk without using water is nearly impossible. However, using water on silk usually causes the silk to stain. ***Seriously though, cleaning silk should always be left to the trained technicians.
  • Chenille and Velvet not only need a special solution, but after cleaning, they need grooming! Seriously, though! In order to dry properly, the fabric needs to be groomed in a particular way! 

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, it is really easy to destroy upholstered furniture when cleaning it! So it is really important to identify the type of fabric before cleaning upholstery!

Here at Topaz Cleaning and Restoration, we spend time educating our technicians and will often test them with “pop quizzes” where we take them to both fabric and furniture stores and have them identify the types of fabric.