Fringe warps snapped off by a beater bar, a cut-down edge that has started to let go, moth grazing under the bed, a corner the puppy decided was a chew toy, or a rug that spent a night in river water. Most of it is fixable by hand.
Rug repair is not patching. A proper repair rebuilds the rug the way it was originally made — foundation first, then pile, matched to the original knot density and dye lot — so the repaired section moves, wears and ages at the same rate as everything around it. Done well, you have to be told where it was.
That is slow work. Reweaving is measured in square inches, not square feet, and a hand on a loom is the only tool that does it properly. The upside is that damage most people assume is terminal usually is not. Rugs arrive folded around a hole and go home flat and whole.
Every repair starts with a free assessment and a straight verdict. If the cost of the work is out of proportion to what the rug is worth, we say so instead of taking the job.
From a short fringe tidy to rebuilding a foot of missing border.
Fringe is the end of the rug’s foundation, not decoration, so when it shreds the rug is unravelling. The commonest cause is a vacuum beater bar catching and snapping warps one row at a time. We secure the ends, rebuild lost warps, and replace or re-knot fringe to match the original.
Side cords take the abuse from vacuum beaters and furniture legs. Once they split, the pile beside them starts letting go. Edges are rewrapped by hand in matched wool.
Burns, tears and worn-through areas are rebuilt knot by knot. The foundation goes back first, then the pile, matched in fibre, colour and density to the field around it.
Moth larvae eat wool from underneath, so by the time bare foundation shows there is usually an active problem. We treat the infestation, then reweave the grazed areas. The rugs that turn up with it here are generally the ones nobody walks on — retired to a porch, a spare room or a storage unit between addresses.
Chewed corners, clawed edges and urine-burnt dye. The rug is decontaminated first, then the missing structure is rebuilt and colour corrected where the original dye was destroyed.
Dye that migrated during a soaking or a bad cleaning, bleach spots, and rugs that were retired to a screened porch and came back the wrong colours because ultraviolet takes the reds first. Colour is rebuilt by hand where the fibre is still sound.
The historic districts are full of rugs that were made smaller to fit an awkward 1920s room. A cut edge is an unsecured edge, and the hurried binding stitched over it eventually lets go along the whole line. We secure the foundation properly and finish the edge so the rug reads as intentional rather than amputated.
Iron casters and brass ferrules corrode into wool in a humid house and leave an orange-brown ring bound into the fibre, which has to be chemically reduced rather than bleached. Alongside that: dead, crushed pile under furniture feet, failed latex on hand-tufted rugs, and brittle warps in antiques.
A great many of the repairs we do could have been avoided by a decent pad. We fit breathable, non-adhesive pads sized to the rug — which matters most on a young slab, where a pad with a solid film in it traps the moisture still coming out of the concrete and holds it against the foundation.
A king tide up through the storm drains in San Marco, the creek over its banks, a supply line behind a washing machine, or a slider that took two days of a nor'easter side-on. The rug on that floor is now on a clock.
Wool survives being wet surprisingly well. What it does not survive is staying wet. In a warm room mould establishes in a saturated foundation in roughly forty-eight hours, and once it is at the base of the pile you cannot vacuum, spray or air-dry it back out. Here the room is nearly always warm enough. Meanwhile unstable dyes start migrating, cotton foundations begin to rot, and whatever the water picked up on the way in is curing into the rug.
Brackish water is worse again, and on the lower St. Johns you do not need a hurricane to meet it — the river is tidal and slightly salty a long way inland. Water that comes up through a drain carries silt and whatever was in the street, and the salt it leaves behind stays hygroscopic long after the rug feels dry, so the fibre keeps pulling moisture back in every humid afternoon. That salt has to be dissolved out in immersion. A fan pointed at a wet rug is not restoration: it dries the surface, locks the contamination into the foundation, and produces a rug that smells fine for three weeks and then does not.
Send pictures of the damage, or we collect the rug at no charge anywhere on the Duval and St. Johns route.
The damage is mapped, materials identified, and you get a written price with options. No work starts without your approval.
Repairs go onto a clean rug. Working new wool into a dirty field leaves a visible patch a year later.
Wool selected by fibre, weight and dye lot against the original, and tested against the field before it goes in.
Foundation rebuilt, then pile knotted in at matching density, then sheared to the surrounding height.
Groomed, inspected against the intake photographs, and delivered back to your floor.
Free assessment on every repair, and a real answer about whether it is worth doing.
The six-stage hand wash every rug goes through, and why in-home wand cleaning fails here.
Cleaning processRiver damp, tannin browning, young slabs and rugs that get packed for a move — what owners here need to know.
Care notesCollection and delivery included across Duval and St. Johns counties.
Contact us