As the financial crisis neared its end in the fall of 2010, I found myself in desperate need of a simpler (less regulated) life. The need for an income to support a small, growing family (now 7 of us) drove me and my wife to start a carpet cleaning company. We soon learned that area rugs were beyond our skill/tooling level and that our clients needed a better service than we could provide for them while the rugs were still in their home(s). I had a friend who owned a carpet dealership who lent me his warehouse on the weekends so that I could use the space to provide a better cleaning result for these rugs. At the time we were using the Pros Choice line of rug cleaning products: Ultra TLC, Natural Fiber Cleaner and Rug Restorer. After watching many YouTube videos on the subject, I felt at least qualified to do a good job (at least better than I could have done in the clients home). Boy was I wrong! It seemed that the more product and water that I used, the more problems and issues leached out of the rugs. I did what any 'greenhorn' cleaner would do... I lightened up on the water and got really good at making the rugs presentable to the clients. I would spend hours on my knees scrubbing, rinsing, extracting and grooming each rug so that I could deliver them back to my clients for their maximum positive reaction. I noticed as I cleaned more rugs that each rug was different than the previous and the next in how it responded to the tooling and cleaning products that I was using. I was spending more time on some rugs than others in reaching the desired results that I was after. The more research that I did, I determined that what I REALLY needed to do was to learn to 'pit wash' the rugs. Yeah, that would really set me apart if I could learn how to submerse the rug, remove the urine/contaminants, control/prevent the dyes from migrating and make a whole bunch of bubbles in the pit so that I could get that warm fuzzy feeling that I assumed other cleaners had when they knew what they were doing in the 'wash-pit.' Wrong again! My next mistakes came about while learning through trial and error about the amounts of needed water supply, management and disposal of water and all of the suds that I was creating. I was causing more work for myself than money was being made. What started out as a simple 'add-on' service for our clients had turned into a giant, soapy mess on the floor in my friends warehouse. Not being one to start something and not finish it, I decided that if I was going to do this, make money at it and get better at it, I needed my own work space. We cleared out the 2 car section of our garage at home and I went all out on some PVC fittings and some plastic sheeting to build my very own wash pit. It wasn't really something that I would be proud to show a client but I was pit washing baby! We washed on Sundays. Not every Sunday but it always seemed to be raining.
-Rug Reviver
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