BeforeAfter
In short: Bedrooms, a landing and a full flight of stairs in a Sunnyvale home, cleaned in one visit. Stairs carry more soil per square foot than any other carpet in a house and take roughly three times as long per area to clean properly.
The situation
Cream carpet through the upstairs bedrooms, the landing and the staircase, in a house with a library wall and a lot of daily movement between floors. The bedrooms were moderately soiled. The stairs were a different story.
A staircase takes the entire household's foot traffic funnelled into a strip about a metre wide. On top of that, the nose of each tread takes the full impact of every step and holds soil the way no flat carpet does.
What we did
- Rooms first, stairs last. Working top down and finishing on the stairs means nobody has to cross wet carpet to get out.
- Hand tool on every tread. Stairs are cleaned with a hand tool, tread by tread, riser by riser. A wand cannot reach the nose of a tread properly and that is where the soil is.
- Extra passes on the noses. Each tread edge gets additional dry strokes, because that is the point that stays wettest and soils fastest.
- Air movers on the flight. A staircase acts as a chimney, so air movement at the bottom dries the whole flight faster than it looks like it should.
The result
The bedrooms came up evenly, with the walking routes no longer readable as a separate shade. The staircase came back to the same colour as the landing it runs into — which before the job it clearly was not.
About five hours for the floor and the flight together.
Questions people ask about this job
How much does it cost to clean carpeted stairs?
Stairs are priced per step rather than by area, usually between $3 and $5 a step in the Bay Area, because they take roughly three times longer per square foot than flat carpet. A standard flight adds about $45 to $70 to a job.
Why do stairs get dirty faster than the rest of the carpet?
The whole household's traffic is concentrated into a narrow strip, and the nose of each tread absorbs the impact of every footfall. A staircase can carry several times the soil load of a bedroom of the same area.
Can you clean carpet and stairs in the same visit?
Yes, and it is the sensible way to do it. We clean rooms first and finish on the stairs so nobody has to walk across freshly cleaned carpet on the way out.
Stairs darker than the floor they lead to? That is normal, and it comes out.
Calculate my priceFreshTouchSF provides carpet cleaning, upholstery cleaning, handyman services and pressure washing in Sunnyvale and across the San Francisco Bay Area. See more jobs in our project journal.