Rug Cleaning in Martinez

A surprising share of the hand-knotted rugs on this side of the county did not come from a showroom. They came home in a shipping container, bought on a posting in the Middle East, Central Asia or Europe, and the crossing is where the damage was done. A steel box on a deck goes through a full temperature swing every twenty-four hours for six to ten weeks. Warm, moist air is sealed in at the port of origin; each night the steel drops below its dew point and that moisture condenses on the roof and the walls; each day it evaporates again and lands on whatever is packed underneath. Shippers call it container rain, and a rug wrapped in plastic sheeting for the journey is worse off rather than better, because the plastic decides where the water collects. What gets handed to us afterwards is a rug with a musty foundation, brown tide lines running across the field along the lines of the folds, sometimes dye that has migrated from one colour into the next along those same lines, and mildew bloom on the back that never appeared on the front. All of that is treatable, but it wants washing and dye stabilisation rather than a surface clean, and every month it spends rolled up in the garage after the move makes that less true.