Decor Disasters by Col Nation

In my specialty cleaning business on the Sunshine Coast I am often asked to clean or fix some difficult or unusual situations.

Nearly every Monday I would get called to one particular resort that held conferences and supplied accommodation to guests in a multi-story building. The individual units were owned by many different people and the in-house housekeeping service maintained the units to a very high standard. The penthouse units were often used for hosting corporate parties and hence the drinks and red wine flowed and often was spilt on their plain coloured, beige, pure wool carpet, and this is where I come into the picture.

After about two years of paying me to attend this same unit nearly every two weeks to remove spots of red wine and a variety of other spots and stains to keep the place looking great, the owner called in an interior decorator to choose a new flooring so they no longer had to pay me to fix their carpet worries. I think the decorator’s fee was as much as they spent on stain removal in a year and the flooring they finally chose, after consulting colour and texture charts and who knows what, was a polished marble tile. “We’ll stop that waste of money on carpet spotting” they thought.

Well the red wine flowed again after the expensive flooring was eventually installed and the very first Monday I was called in because housekeeping couldn’t get the red wine stains off the beautiful new marble floor. “Col can you help us please” was the desperate call I received.

Red wine contains acids, and it’s those same acids that give it the bite that lovers of red wine enjoy so much, along with the natural tannins and dyes that give it the colours and flavours. Marble is just Calcium Carbonate and red wine is acidic. When you mix these two together you get a chemical reaction that eats away the surface as it releases carbon dioxide. You may remember in science class mixing vinegar red food colouring and baking soda to create a red frothy reaction that spewed ‘lava’ from a paper mache volcano. The marble is also quite porous so it absorbs the colours of whatever was spilt and any acid content etches away at the glossy surface. Well I was able to de-colour the red wine stains but the dull surface was not restorable with cleaning or stain removal and required the services of a hard floor expert to re-finish the flooring to restore the shiny finish. The cost of the very first repair exceeded my cost to spot clean the carpet for nearly a year. It was less than a month old at the time.

I am often faced with upholstery that has similar issues. Decorators choose fabrics that look good and rarely consider what happens when spills or soiling occurs. Dyes that run or simply change colour from sunlight or oxidation, textures that change, and even fibres that are damaged from spills of everyday beverages such as fruit juice, tea, coffee and of course the inevitable red wine.

Fibres obtained from plants can also be problematic.

One particular fibre is rayon, sometimes called ‘viscose’. This fibre is made from re-constituted plant sugars that can be obtained from waste plant material or wood chip. This is almost like paper and is very weak when wet. It can also easily sustain chemical damage and will produce a brown discolouration when wet with pure water, so it doesn’t stand a chance against red wine or even beer.

Linen is also another fibre that can be difficult to deal with. It is not to be confused with the cotton sheets and towels that are often referred to as linen. True, unbleached linen fibres are obtained from the stem of the flax plant and as such, contains high levels of its own tannins.  Tannins are like the glue that holds the plant cells together. We find it in high concentrations in fibres obtained from structural parts of the plant. It is found in high concentration in the grape skin that helps give red wine its colour. Removing a red wine stain, from a fibre that also contains high concentrations of tannins, is a real nightmare for a cleaner, even a specialist such as myself.  The tannins give unbleached linen fabrics that natural creamy colour is easily removed by the chemistry required to remove red wine stains.

So I guess my point of this is that we should look beyond the colour charts and sales spiel of the providers and ask some questions about the surfaces we are expected to maintain for the years ahead. “Can I clean this with normal water based cleaning procedures or do I have to only clean with special dry cleaning solvents that will require closing off the entire floor and shutting down air conditioners for two days while the fumes clear the building? Will spills of beverages cause permanent damage to the surface or fibres? What is the correct maintenance procedures for the finishes and do I have to purchase specialised equipment and chemicals to maintain the flooring or upholstery?” are questions we should ask before committing to the expense of new furnishings .

Col Nation is the owner of ABBsolve Services, (www.abbsolve.com.au) a specialist upholstery cleaning and stain removal service on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.  He also runs Nation Training (www.nationtraining.com.au) which provides specialised training in the field of carpet and upholstery maintenance. Nation Training provides training in Australia and New Zealand for the WoolSafe Organisation. Colin was the author of the draft of the Australian Standard for upholstery cleaning which was published as A/NZ Standard 4849.1 in 2003 and this year was elected President of the Individual Cleaners Association of Australia and New Zealand (ICAN).