Rug Cleaning in Ortega

More rugs in this neighborhood were bought abroad than were bought in Florida, and they arrive with a history nobody wrote down. A rug carried home from a tour in Bahrain, Naples, Rota, Yokosuka or Djibouti was usually chosen in an afternoon on the strength of how it looked, not on what it was made of, and the seller had every reason to be vague. Three things turn up repeatedly as a result. Fibre that is not what the buyer was told: viscose sold as silk is the commonest by a wide margin, and it behaves nothing like silk in water. Dyes that were never fixed properly, which are perfectly stable in a dry climate and start to move the first time the rug is genuinely wetted. And the crossing itself — household goods travel by sea in a steel container that sweats every night for six weeks, so a rug that was rolled tight and wrapped in plastic before it was loaded can come out of the box with a bloom of mould through the foundation and a smell that arrived with it rather than in the house. All of that is findable before anything gets wet, which is the point of testing first: fibre burn and solubility checks, then a dye bleed test on every colour separately, then a decision.