Moth grazing on the side that lives under the sideboard, fringe a robot vacuum has been eating for two years, a corner the puppy claimed, a rug cut down with shears to fit a smaller room, or one that came home from a posting with tide lines across it. Most of it is fixable by hand.
Repair is not patching. A proper repair rebuilds the rug the way it was made in the first place — foundation first, then pile, matched to the original knot density and dye lot — so that the repaired section moves, wears and ages at the same rate as everything around it. Done properly, somebody has to point it out to you.
That is slow work. Reweaving is measured in square inches rather than square feet, and a hand on a loom remains the only tool that does it. The compensation is that damage most people write off as terminal usually is not. Rugs arrive folded around a hole and leave flat and whole.
Every repair opens with a free assessment and a straight verdict. If the cost of the work is out of proportion to what the rug is worth, we will say so rather than take the job.
From a short fringe tidy to rebuilding a foot of missing border.
Fringe is the end of the rug’s foundation, not trim, so when it shreds what you are watching is the rug coming undone. We secure the ends, rebuild lost warps, and replace or re-knot fringe to match the original. Robot vacuums are the most common cause we see now, and they take one end long before the other.
Side cords absorb the punishment from vacuum beaters and furniture legs. Once they split, the pile beside them starts letting go row by row. Edges are rewrapped by hand in matched wool.
Burns, tears and worn-through areas rebuilt knot by knot. The foundation goes back first, then the pile, matched in fibre, colour and density to the field around it.
Larvae eat wool from underneath, so by the time bare foundation shows through there is normally an active population. We treat the infestation, then reweave the grazed areas. The classic find on the Hill is a rug in a big, loosely built house where a formal room has gone undisturbed for years — warm, still and humid is precisely the specification they are looking for.
Chewed corners, clawed edges and urine-burnt dye. The rug is decontaminated first, then the missing structure is rebuilt and the colour corrected where the original dye has been destroyed.
Bleached bands along a sunroom wall of glass, bleach spots, alkaline burn from stall residue left too long, and dye that migrated during a bad cleaning or a long damp crossing in a container. Colour is rebuilt by hand wherever the fibre is still sound.
One of the most common jobs on this route, because so many good rugs came out of large rooms into smaller ones. Resizing properly means opening the foundation between wefts, rejoining the halves knot by knot so the pattern still runs, and building a new selvedge and fringe onto the cut end — not shears and binding tape, which leaves a rug shedding rows inward for the rest of its life. Buckled rugs are blocked back to square in the same pass.
Failed latex on hand-tufted rugs, cotton warps gone brittle in antiques, foundations softened by years on a damp slab, and rugs that ripple because the structure gave way. Structure is fixed before anything cosmetic is attempted.
A great many of the repairs we do would never have been needed if the rug had a decent pad under it. We fit breathable, non-adhesive pads sized to the rug — which matters most over a mid-century slab, where a solid rubber pad seals ground moisture against the foundation, and over new vinyl plank, where cheap PVC grip pads migrate plasticiser into both the floor and the rug.
A supply line behind a washing machine, a water heater at the end of its life, a thunderstorm that put more water on a downtown street than the drains could take, or a slow damp nobody spotted for a year. The rug on that floor is now on a clock.
Wool survives being wet remarkably well. What it does not survive is staying wet. In a warm room mould establishes in a saturated foundation in roughly forty-eight hours, and once it is at the base of the pile you cannot vacuum, spray or air-dry it back out. Meanwhile unstable dyes begin migrating, cotton foundations start to rot, and whatever the water picked up crossing the floor is curing into the rug.
The slow versions are the ones that get missed, and this valley produces several. A rug sealed to a mid-century slab by a rubber pad is being wetted from below continuously and looks perfectly normal from above. A sunroom rug taking condensation off cold glass every winter morning rots at the selvedge while the field stays pristine. A rug that crossed an ocean in a container spent weeks in a daily cycle of condensation and evaporation. In each of those the pile reads as sound and the foundation is not, which is why the assessment happens on the back of the rug.
Send pictures of the damage, or we collect the rug at no charge anywhere across Richmond, Columbia and Aiken counties.
The damage is mapped, materials identified, and you get a written price with options. No work starts without your approval.
Repairs go onto a clean rug. Working new wool into a dirty field leaves a visible patch a year later.
Wool selected by fibre, weight and dye lot against the original, and tested against the field before it goes in.
Foundation rebuilt, then pile knotted in at matching density, then sheared to the surrounding height.
Groomed, inspected against the intake photographs, and delivered back to your floor.
Free assessment on every repair, and a real answer about whether it is worth doing.
The six-stage hand wash every rug goes through, and why in-home wand cleaning fails here.
Cleaning processRiver silt, ridge sand, barn soil and slow damp — what rug owners in this valley need to know.
Care notesCollection and delivery included across Richmond, Columbia and Aiken counties.
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