If you have a pet, chances are your favorite furball has shown a proclivity for scratching the upholstery in your home. A Personal Touch Carpet Cleaning in Littleton offers some insight into how we repair these scratches to keep your furniture looking good.
Assess the Extent of Damage
Over time, small snags, nicks, and shredding can easily turn into full-blown tears and holes. And of course, the more your cat uses your furniture as its de facto scratching post, the faster the small problems will become big ones. Our local furniture repair team will assess the extent of damage to your furniture, noting the quantity of damaged areas and the severity of each.
Option 1: Covering
If the damage is not significant in terms of large holes and tears, but instead consists only of scratches, covering is the best option. Even if there are scratches on many parts of your couch or easy chair, covering is still more budget-friendly than reupholstering the damaged piece. The easiest solution, depending on the amount of area covered by scratching, is to conceal the damage with a pillow or throw. If the furniture is something slipcovered, i.e. a futon or sofa, we can apply an elasticized slipcover – or, we can cover the entire item with a fabric “cover” that gets tucked into the furniture’s crevices and is held in place with PVC piping or something similar.
Another solution to consider, especially if the damage is restricted to a specific part of the furniture piece (armrest, leg, etc.), is reupholstering just that part of the item. If we were to go this route, we would use a contrasting color for the freshly upholstered section, since trying to match patterns/color is difficult with furniture.
Option 2: Patching a Hole
When patching a hole in upholstery, the approach taken by A Personal Touch Carpet Cleaning is similar to our approach to patching carpet. Specifically, we’ll take a piece of fabric from an area on the item that is out of the way (invisible to the eye), and use this piece to patch the hole. The process requires a steady hand: first we’ll need to hold the torn area aside and put the patch underneath it, and right afterwards we’ll use pins to hold the patch in place. The next step is especially tricky, because it involves spreading fabric glue gently along the tear’s edges and atop the patch, and then affixing the patch to the torn area without dribbling glue on the fabric or causing air bubbles to form. When the glue is dry, which typically takes a few hours, we remove the pins and voila – the hole is “gone”.
Option 3: Remedying a Rip
Though less egregious than holes, rips are still unsightly and annoying. Our furniture repair experts in Littleton will remedy your upholstery rips with needle, thread, and a protective sealant. This last item is applied first, to the edges of the rip, to eliminate the chance of further ripping. When this is done, we pinch the two ripped edges together and stitch them up, being careful to first replace any filling that may have fallen out due to the rip.
For more tips on upholstery cleaning and everything carpet-related – stretching, repair, cleaning, and more – contact our professional carpet cleaning company serving Denver.
Remember at A Personal Touch, “We don’t cut corners, we clean them.”
