Carpet cleaning problem

Bodkin64

Hi,
The carpets in our house are wool with a natural fibre backing - from recollection it’s jute.  They’re a light beige/cream colour. Sometime ago we made an awful mistake with a hired Rug Doctor cleaner and over-wetted some areas, which is evidently a complete no-no with carpets like this as discolouration from the backing wicks up into the wool and stains it. We were left with a clean carpet, but with large areas of very unsightly grey staining in the areas which got too wet....

We have never found any way of removing these stains, repeated conventional cleaning has no effect. We’ve thought of recruiting a professional carpet cleaning service in the hope they might be able to do something, otherwise we’ll have to shell out a small fortune on replacing the carpets altogether. Does anyone have any suggestions (that don’t involve hindsight) for improving the stains? I’d wondered whether there is something that could be done to bleach the areas, given the carpet’s light colour, but didn’t especially want to risk making it even worse.
Thanks in anticipation...

lesalanos

Claim on your house insurance 

Bodkin64

lesalanos said:

Claim on your house insurance 

A bit late for that, it happened a while ago. Anyhow I don’t see we’d get anywhere, I think it was our fault (the clue was in the OP... “we made an awful mistake “). I just want to know if there’s anything we can do to mitigate the damage

lesalanos

Malcyb said:

lesalanos said:

Claim on your house insurance 

A bit late for that, it happened a while ago. Anyhow I don’t see we’d get anywhere, I think it was our fault (the clue was in the OP... “we made an awful mistake “). I just want to know if there’s anything we can do to mitigate the damage

Do you have accidental damage cover? 

Bodkin64

lesalanos said:

Malcyb said:

lesalanos said:

Claim on your house insurance 

A bit late for that, it happened a while ago. Anyhow I don’t see we’d get anywhere, I think it was our fault (the clue was in the OP... “we made an awful mistake “). I just want to know if there’s anything we can do to mitigate the damage

Do you have accidental damage cover? 

Yes I do, however the damage occurred years ago, so far too late to claim. Perhaps we should have claimed at the time but hindsight’s a great thing.

Bodkin64

I’ve discovered that Prochem produce a range of chemicals that *claim* to treat jute browning (which is what I think we have here). Since they’re for professional use I think I might play safe and find a reputable carpet cleaning company.

ryan7

If it happened years ago and you've managed to live with it for this long.... 

Bodkin64

ryan7 said:

If it happened years ago and you've managed to live with it for this long.... 

Sure, it’s an annoyance more than anything - we’ve hidden the worst areas with rugs - but now we’ve more time on our hands and sprucing the place up a bit, the carpet sticks out like a sore thumb so it would be good to do something about it without breaking the bank.

twopenny

How big is the carpet?
There are a lot of large remnants around at the moment with so many people doing their houses up now. I was looking at some wool ones at half price only yesterday and this should continue for a while yet.

Bodkin64

twopenny said:

How big is the carpet?
There are a lot of large remnants around at the moment with so many people doing their houses up now. I was looking at some wool ones only yesterday and this should continue for a while yet.

Interesting to know… unfortunately although the stained areas are fairly small we’ve got the same carpet running through a few rooms so I’d doubt that’s feasible. But maybe something to consider if efforts to improve the stains totally fail.

coffeehound

If you could live with a darker shade, maybe dyeing would be easier; apparently there are companies that do this