Picture your Oriental rug, in all its splendor. Now picture your Oriental rug with the neighbor kid’s grape jelly sandwich smeared into it.
Enter stain-fighting paladin James Owen, assistant cleaning manager at Evanston’s 75-year-old Oscar Isberian Rugs Inc.
Owen handles at least 50 soiled, smudged and stained rugs every day. When the store’s delivery truck pulls in at 8 a.m., 25-year-old Owen painstakingly examines the new arrivals.
“I immediately check the rugs for stains and necessary repairs,” he says. “Some stains need to be worked on and some repairs need to be done before the regular cleaning, because they get worse in the wash.”
The actual cleaning takes 20 minutes to half an hour, but a large rug may take three days to dry. The cleaning, which costs $1 to $1.50 per square foot, “is not like laundry. We don’t just stick it in a machine. We wash them by hand,” says Owen, who wears knee-high boots as he stoops in his work area-a large, open space with a sloped, concrete drainage floor.
Hand-wash
He describes his daily ritual: “First we wet the rug with cold water and mild detergent and scrub it by hand. The fringes or tassels are scrubbed separately, because we want to get them as white as possible. Then we thoroughly rinse the rug with cold water and check it again for stains that remain. We work on those using various chemicals, which are not dangerous alone but can be dangerous in combination.
“After we are satisfied, we do a final acid rinse, which prevents the natural fibers in the rug from turning brown as they dry, and it also helps stabilize the colors in the rug.”
If Owen fears the dyes in a rug may run, he lays it flat to dry; otherwise he hangs it. “Synthetic materials have no problem with color bleed,” he says. “Wool rugs are usually safe. With cotton and silk rugs, the dye doesn’t stick to the fibers as well, and there is much more chance of color bleeding.
“Then I go over it another time and check for anything that isn’t right. I make sure that the fringes are straight and clean, and sometimes work on other stains that didn’t come out,” he says. Afterwards, Owen rolls up the freshly cleaned rugs and puts them in a storage area to be picked up or delivered to clients. Throughout the cleaning process, each piece has been worked on by four or five people.
Owen learned his craft through six years of on-the-job training at cleaning and restoration shops around the country. He has been at his current post for under a year. It’s not a difficult job, he attests, but it is certainly “a specialized skill, because there are a lot of little things to remember as you’re going through each process. You can’t just take someone off the street and have them do it.”
Specialist required
Even a wall-to-wall carpet cleaner who comes to your house is ill-equipped to handle your expensive Oriental, he believes. “They don’t know anything about how the rug is made, or the materials used. They might just run their machine over your expensive rug. And the residue left from the soap is never rinsed away, so it will always stay in the rug. That is a very sorry, sorry excuse for caring for an Oriental rug. Even an in-plant steam cleaning is not enough because all they are doing is cleaning the surface.”
He speaks from experience: “I did in-home carpet cleaning for a while, but I didn’t like it, because I didn’t get to work on any Oriental rugs.” In addition to cleaning fine rugs, “(now) I also help sell them a little bit. I help customers flip through the stacks. But as far as retail, I have a lot to learn.”
Owen enjoys working with people’s prized floor coverings. “It’s interesting to go into people’s houses, take something out that they care very much about, do work on it, and bring them back and have them satisfied with it,” he says. “People are pretty attached to their rugs. Some have been handed down from parents or grandparents, and they are really quite an investment.”
He has a special interest in the history and preservation of older rugs. “I’ve seen some very old Navajo rugs, hundreds of years old and still in pretty decent condition. It’s amazing to see the time and effort it takes to make them, and to know that a couple of hundred years later, they are still around and being taken care of. I read about the subject as much as I can. Did you know it can take three or four people six or nine months to knot a rug?”
“I’ve seen some very interesting designs in rugs,” continues Owen, who hopes to someday become a dealer of antique carpets. “Some weavers put into the rugs whatever they see in their life. A guy came back from the Persian Gulf War with a 9- by 12-foot rug that had a whole battle scene depicted, with tanks, bombs, guns, hand grenades.”
The most frustrating part of Owen’s job is “dealing with people who have unrealistic demands,” he says. “The dog has just urinated all over the rug and there are holes in it, but the customer just wants the rug to look brand new again.
“Sometimes a rug is in such bad shape that we can’t clean it because if we do, it will disintegrate and wash down the drain. They don’t like to hear that. They say, `I’ll pay whatever you want. Just clean it.’
“Some customers are very calm about the cleaning of their rugs. Others are very nervous. They are worried about the money that went into the purchase. If they are really concerned, I invite them into the store and walk them through the process. If they want, they can watch their rug being cleaned.”
Traffic pattern
Owen recommends that rugs be cleaned “a couple of times a year if you have kids and lots of traffic in your house. If not, and if your house is very clean, you only have to do it every couple of years.”
The biggest threat to priceless rugs is your precious pet, he says. “Cats scratch and chew on rugs and use them as a toilet. You have to train your pets.”
Regular professional cleanings are as crucial to the health of a rug as regular oil changes are to the lifelong maintenance of a car, he says, noting that in addition to the danger of stains becoming permanent, “dirt acts like little pieces of glass, cutting into the fibers, and wearing them down.”
