OK, it’s been a while since I posted anything on my (new) blog. I know, you crave to know what’s been going on with my new challenge (cleaning carpet & upholstery in Archway N19, remember?). I am ready with a short answer for you: It’s been great!
I am still at the very early stages of my becoming a full-blown carpet cleaner, however, I have started and doing a little progress. As wise people say “Done is better than perfect”, I decided I will jump from the cliff and learn to fly on my way down.
Before I delve into the details and nitty-gritty of How to Become a Professional Carpet and Rug Cleaner in Archway (in the year 2021), I will give you a bit of heads up about carpets. I was surprised to find out many people across the globe do not know this soft furnishing material as we know it in the UK, however, they know it as rugs or some kind of wall coverings. So here goes.
With a carpet, you have extra work in the form of vacuuming as well as sweeping all your hard floor surfaces. Carpets need a bit more in the way of deep cleaning because of their tendency to collect odours and stains. Nevertheless, we persist with them in our homes in most cases. Why do we do it? What are the advantages of having a carpet that make them worth all the bother of installing and cleaning them?
The reasons for having a carpet down on your floors, whether it’s in the office or at home, are many and go beyond just fashion and showing that you can afford it. These reasons explain why even if you are one of those people who’s better off without a carpet on the floor for asthma reasons, you’ll probably have a mat or rug down instead, as mats and rugs do the same sort of job.
The story of why we put carpets on our floors instead of (or as well as) on our walls is a story of the senses and of comfort in our surroundings. Grab a nice hot cuppa and let’s explore them together!
Carpets For Softness
Wooden floors, concrete floors and tiled floors are all known as a hard floor for a reason. While being hard can have its advantages in the right places (get your mind out of the gutter!), it’s not always what you want for a floor in your home or in your office. At home, there are times when you want to sit on the floor to play with children or with the dog. You may want to lie down on the floor and do a few exercises during the day, especially if you work from home. Try doing this on a floor without a carpet and you’ll soon know all about it. Your hips and knees won’t thank you. However, with a carpet down, the floor is a lot nicer to sit, play, exercise and lie down on.
Even if you never sit or lie on the floor, the softness underfoot can still be a real advantage. If you have to spend a lot of time on your feet – as a teacher, perhaps – then it can be hard on your hips, feet and back if you have to do this on a hard floor. Those of you who have to do this probably already know all about this. However, with a carpet down, it’s a bit easier on the body!
If you’ve got small children, you know that learning to walk is a tricky business and involves a lot of falling over. The process is a lot less painful and involves fewer tears if there’s a carpet down.
What’s more, we all drop things from time to time. If you drop, say, a wineglass or a coffee cup, onto a hard floor, it’s quite likely to break, meaning that you don’t just have to deal with the spilled drink; you have to deal with the nasty sharp pieces of broken glass or porcelain. If you drop it onto a carpet, then all you’ll have to deal with is the stain. Yes, removing wine or coffee stains out of a carpet can be job for a professional carpet cleaner but it’s much less hassle than the risk of getting splinters in your feet on top of losing your favourite mug.
Carpets For Quiet
Hard floors might break dropped wineglasses but other things just bounce off them very easily, especially sound waves. Rooms with hard floors tend to echo more because of this. This means that any noises in the room reverberate a little, especially if the walls are hard and bare as well – and window glass falls into the category of “hard and bare”. In the case of wood, you can also have the issue of sound waves travelling through the wood from one room to another or into the walls.
Carpet, however, deadens, scatters and absorbs some of the sound waves, so they don’t bounce anywhere else – like into your unwilling ears. Putting carpet down makes a room a lot quieter, which is better for your sanity by reducing the audible clutter. You may not get the reverb effects possible in the bathroom, which is why we sing in the shower or bathtub, but that reduction in echo makes the sounds in your home or office easier to listen to and less jumbled.
Having carpet down also means that you can walk more quietly, which is another reason why they help stop a room becoming too noisy. This is great for privacy. It’s really embarrassing if you need to use the loo in the middle of the night and you have to march down an uncarpeted hallway and through a lot of uncarpeted rooms, your slippers slapping on the floors with every step. You can swear that everybody is going to hear you and know exactly where you’re going. With carpet, however, your footfalls are light and you can tiptoe softly all the way without waking anybody up – unless you kick the sofa, but that’s another story and not the fault of the carpet.
Carpets For Warmth
Unless you’re an absolute newbie to the world of interior decorating and housing design, you’ll know about the importance of insulation. Whether you are in a hot place wanting to keep the heat out and the cool in, like our friends in California, or whether you live in a chillier clime and want to trap the warmth in like we do here in the UK, insulation is a must. We can insulate our walls and roofs, and double-glaze our windows, but it’s possible to lose heat through the floor as well if it’s not insulated. This is particularly a problem in older wooden cottages with floorboards but doesn’t pose much of an issue for modern apartment buildings.
Even the thinnest carpet will insulate the floor, preventing heat being lost through the floors and (in the case of those wooden floors) draughts coming up. Add in a properly installed wall to wall carpet with underlay and the amount of extra warmth in that room has to be experienced to be believed.
Carpets For Safety
We’ve all seen those signs up in the supermarket or a public loo when someone’s cleaned the floor and left it a bit damp: Slippery When Wet. You never see these signs on a carpeted floor simply because if they get wet or if you have shoes that have got damp and/or don’t have much tread, they won’t get slippery. This means that they pose less of a hazard. Even in buildings where most of the floors are hard floors, there will be mats or rugs down by the floor to receive those wet shoes and cut down on the risk of slips and falls. Yes, they’ll need to be cleaned more often because of this, but that’s what carpet cleaning services are for.
Although the safety aspects are more of an issue in office buildings and other public settings, they’re still important around the home. We’ve all heard the warnings about how most accidents happen at home rather than in the workplace, and some of those accidents involve slipping on hard floors. Although one can’t do away with hard floors altogether in the home and some rooms can’t have carpet down (bathrooms, for example), if someone is at high risk of falls (e.g. older people), then having carpet in as many places as possible will help reduce that risk.
Softness, quiet, warmth and safety: I don’t know about you, but those are attributes that I’d like my home to have and my office as well. They’re all made possible by carpets, mats and rugs, so it’s no wonder that we like them so much.
