Stair carpet cleaning

Fitted stair carpet or stair runner: these are not the same job

Fitted stair carpet proper — traptapijt in Dutch — covers the full width. It follows the tread and the riser, it is stretched and fixed over the whole flight. Nothing comes apart: we work on it as it is, and the water we put into it has to come back out at the top, because there is nowhere for it to drain away.

The stair runner — traploper — is another object altogether: a strip laid down the centre of a wooden or stone staircase, held by rods seated in the angle of the treads. There, we take it up. We remove the rods, lift the strip, and almost always find a line of compacted dust at every tread: this is what the vacuum brush has been unable to reach for years. We clean the bare wood, then the strip, then lay it back.

Both call for the same pre-treatment, but not for the same mechanics. On a fitted stair carpet, the nozzle comes down tread by tread, pulled towards you. On a runner that has been taken up, the strip is treated flat, which changes everything for the rinsing as well as for the drying — and makes it possible to wash both faces of the selvedge.

The stair nosing wears first

Look at any old staircase: the palest, flattest band follows exactly the edge of each tread. The stair nosing takes the weight of the body on a few millimetres of width, and the foot pivots on it going up as well as coming down. The fibre is sheared between the sole and the angle of the substrate.

So that grey is not only dirt. Part of it is soiling — real enough, and it comes out — and part of it is fibre that has been flattened, opened and abraded, and no longer returns the light in the same way. Cleaning recovers the first and lifts the second a little. Better to say it beforehand: a stair nosing will stay paler than its riser.

When the wear has gone right through to the backing, cleaning is no longer the answer. On a stair runner there is an elegant way out: shift the strip a few centimetres up or down, so that the nosings fall on intact fibre. On a fitted stair carpet that has been glued down, the flight has to be replaced.

Drying without closing the staircase

This is the constraint that governs all the rest. In a block of flats, a hotel or a lived-in house, the stairwell cannot be shut off: people have to be able to go up and down during the job and immediately afterwards.

So we work flight by flight, and half-width at a time where the width allows it, with signs at both ends and a temporary non-slip covering on the treads left free. A damp tread on wood is slippery: that is the only real risk on this job, and it is dealt with by organisation, not by relying on the occupants to be careful.

Washing is done with reduced water and extra dry passes: the nozzle goes back over without injecting, two or three times, until the fibre gives nothing more. Then a stream of air across the surface, directed from the top downwards, following the natural draught of the stairwell.

The places a machine cannot reach

There is an internal angle at every step, between the tread and the riser. The nozzle will not sit in it: it passes over the top. Yet that is where the dirt gathers, pushed back by soles at every step, and it is the first place a trained eye looks.

That angle is done by hand, with a brush and stain remover, before the machine goes over. The same goes for the stair strings — the vertical part at the sides, almost always forgotten — and for the winder treads of a turning staircase, where the strip is cut on the diagonal and presents a selvedge that frays as soon as it is brushed too hard.

Send a photograph of the whole flight and a close-up of one stair nosing, stating the number of steps and how the carpet is laid: a costed reply within 48 working hours.