Disaster in the studio

One winter evening Francesca Mama (17) was upstairs in her makeshift art studio she used for A-level work. She’d had a hard day, made herself a coffee, and switched on the TV…

Two days later her mother, Thrity, was checking out the room when a look of horror crossed her face. A large dark stain was staring up at her from the middle of the cream-coloured carpet. She could see what had happened. A slight nudge of Francesca’s chair had tipped over the coffee cup left on the floor nearby, leaving an ugly brown mark. But no one had noticed it and the coffee had soaked in and dried.

“I didn’t have much hope of getting it out,” said Thrity, who as a garden designer (from TM Garden Design, Watford) was used to solving problems. But she did know someone from a local business network group in her home town of Watford, who ran Natural Home Clean, an eco-friendly dry carpet cleaning business operating mainly in Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

“I’ll come and give it a go,” said its owner, Debi King. On arrival, she heaved a large vacuum cleaner-type machine up the stairs and attached a “hopper”. She poured “something resembling sawdust with a pleasant citrus smell” over the carpet, which she began scrubbing, and collected the sprinkled cleaner in the hopper.

She didn't use water. The “sawdust” was an organic, eco-friendly compound that removes dust mites and other allergens, avoiding causing allergies which some chemicals used in other cleaning methods can produce. And it was safe for pets. She even composted it after use.

Thrity had not hired a carpet cleaner before and had tried cleaning carpets herself. “The trouble with wet carpet cleaners is that their carpets are left damp. It’s a pain." And she was not the only one unhappy. Two neighbours had just had their carpets wet-cleaned and both complained that the result was damp – and streaky.

“I even tried using a steam cleaner once but it too left everything damp,” she said. “I had to leave the doors open."

The dry cleaning took about 90 minutes and the result left Thrity stunned. “I thought she might just fade the stain a bit but she completely removed it. You could walk on it as soon as she’d finished – it was dry! She had literally lifted the pile and refreshed it. It had the nice cushiony feel of a new carpet.”

The next task was to clean a very grubby rug, hosting spilt curry, Ribena stains and general wear and tear. Debi again said she’d give it a go but no guarantees. “My poor old tired rug got a new lease of life,” said Thrity, who had considered buying a replacement. “It was almost like new again.”

She said the nice thing about Debi was that she never made promises to people which she couldn’t keep. “If it’s a stain she knows she can’t get out, she’ll say so.”

Any general advice about spills? “Dab out as much as you can and dilute it with water, she told me,” said Thrity. “But don’t use any of those proprietary cleaners from the supermarkets because sometimes they will actually ‘set’ the stain.”

Thrity said she didn’t recommend lightly “especially if it’s to my own clients. If anything goes wrong it comes back on me. But I’d certainly use Debi again and recommend her to anyone who asks.

“She is lovely to deal with, not pushy, quite unassuming – and she does have a magic machine that does wonderful things to your carpet and makes it smell nice, too.”

For a free quotation, please contact Debi on 07967 372005, (office) 01296 319744, or email naturalhomeclean@yahoo.co.uk