Regular Sofa Care To Protect Your Set
Sofas come in different shapes and sizes. From the loveseats, 3 to 7-seater units, recliners and chaise lounges – they all have their purpose in the rooms where they are set up in. You must have taken your time to pick the right sofa that matches your style preferences. From the design construction, to the colour and pattern of the upholstery, you weighed your options before making the final decision. Do you remember how that sofa looked when you first brought it back home from the store? The way it made the room pop, and you were excited about having guests come over to check it out? How does the sofa look like now? Is it a source of inspiration, or do you dread walking through the front door? Are you able to sit back comfortably on it, or are you assaulted by odours and allergens the moment you hit the cushions?
You want to have an elegant and appealing interior to come home to, not find the furniture in a mess, covered with stains and reeking of odours. The large size of the sofa, and its strategic position in the room in which it’s placed, makes it one of the main aspects that will impact the decor of your living area. You don’t want to watch all that effort and money get washed down the drain because of the sofa deteriorating fast. A dull and dilapidated set ruins the decor of the space and you find yourself being forced to consider replacing the entire unit. This does not have to be your fate. Preserve the beauty and appeal of your sofa, and prolong its lifespan by ensuring that it has properly been taken care of.
Sofa Cleaning Blunders That You Should Avoid
As you proceed with the sofa care and maintenance, there are some mistakes that you should be keen to avoid. They pose a risk to the longevity of your unit, and you don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you’re digging into your pocket to fork out more money to make premature replacements. These sofa cleaning blunders include:
- Using hazardous chemicals on the upholstery
Sure, that ammonia solution or vinegar was effective when removing the stubborn stains on your floor and countertops. However, this does not necessarily make it suitable for getting rid of the stains on your furniture. Working with the wrong chemicals is one of the most common DIY sofa cleaning mistakes. Products that are incompatible with the upholstery material can corrode its fibres and negatively impact its structural integrity. Others will dull the sofa, taking away its appeal. Note that there are particularly hazardous chemicals that will affect the cleaner, leading to breathing difficulties, eye irritation and even skin rashes. While different scenarios call for varying kinds of chemicals to be used, one needs to ensure that the products selected will be suitable for the upholstery being worked on, and for the potent reagents, safety measures need to be put in place before applying the products.
- Leaving residue on the sofa
When carrying out the occasional spot treatment, ensure that the solutions used have been wiped off the spot. When residue remains on the upholstery, it acts as a dirt magnet, and that area will build up soiling at a faster rate. This is also an issue that is common with the DIY and rookie sofa cleaning where low-capacity machinery is used. After scrubbing the sofa, the equipment needs to extract the mixture of cleaning solution and debris from the unit. However due to the reduced capacities of the rented sofa cleaning machinery, there will be residue that remains behind.
- Overwetting the sofa
When there is a stain on the upholstery, one may have the urge to dilute it with copious amounts of water. With heavy build up of dirt, there may be the temptation to soak the upholstery in water and flush out the grime. Such acts can end up doing more harm than good to your unit. From causing the stain to be soaked deeper into the upholstery, shrinking the delicate fabric units, to material like leather upholsteries getting ruined by the water – these are not outcomes you want for your set. Remember that when the upholstery remains wet for too long, then this will give an opportunity for mould and mildew to grow. An infestation of fungi in your unit is a threat to the structural integrity of the sofa, as well as the health of those in the premises.
- Hiring extremely cheap cleaning services
Lastly, you don’t want a novice experimenting on our sofa. Those extremely cheap rates end up being costly in the long run. Before you sign up for such services, take a moment to ponder why the company is offering them at rates below its competitors. It can be due to a myriad of issues. For instance, the company may be relying on unskilled personnel to handle the sofa cleaning, which puts your unit at risk of the wrong products and systems being used on it. The company may also be working with low-capacity machinery, in which case the task can end up taking far much longer than anticipated or not yield the expected quality of results, which forces you to make arrangements to have the job repeated, and this will incur additional costs.
As part of the sofa care, you can look into treatment processes after the cleaning has been carried out. For instance, you can have anti-stain treatment applied on the upholstery. These products increase the ability of the upholstery to repel the water and oil-based stains. Note that this does not mean that you should ignore the spills – they still should be cleaned up as soon as possible. The anti-stain treatments simply buy you more time to deal with the spot, and reduce the chances of permanent stains forming. For those with leather sofas, it is recommended that you have the unit moisturized. Here, the lost oils are replaced, which maintains the soft and supple feel of the upholstery.
