Fitted carpet cleaning in Zaventem

Living with the windows shut

The night flight paths over the periphery have for years set the Flemish government against the Brussels Region; the restriction on night cargo flights on grounds of noise for local residents led DHL Aviation to move its hub to Leipzig/Halle, with a fall in freight in 2008-2009.

A fitted carpet that has taken in water has to be dealt with within forty-eight hours: beyond that, the mould starts from the substrate and not from the fibre.

Who lives here

The American Department of Defense school is in Sterrebeek: the Brussels Unit School — formerly the Brussels American School, renamed in 2025 — at J.F. Kennedylaan 1, 1933 Sterrebeek, run by DoDEA, 257 pupils from kindergarten to the final year; the built heritage inventory records an American school established in Sterrebeek as early as 1967. The pupils are the children of DoD staff, American federal officials and defence contractors — that is, of NATO families.

Offices, consulting rooms, waiting rooms: that kind of local economy calls for periodic maintenance rather than catch-up cleaning.

The building stock

In Sterrebeek the inventory describes rendered façades with cornices from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, in sandstone with quoins, then two waves of villas: the 1920s-1930s on the Lindenberg and around the racecourse (semi-detached single-family houses), then 1950-1970 with a regionalist sprawl around the core, and from the 1970s onwards housing estates on the edges of the castle estates mixing modernist and neoclassical villas. Two eighteenth-century châteaux frame the village: the château de Sterrebeek and Ter Meeren, whose origins go back to the fourteenth century with its keep. The tram line of the 1890s and the Mechelsesteenweg turned this farming village into a "verstedelijkt woondorp" whose inhabitants work mainly in Brussels.

On a bonded fitted carpet or on tiles, the technique is not the same as on a knotted rug: here, hot water extraction is the right move.