Old Cottages and New Estates Share One Name in Mile End

With the carpet itself rather than with a price. Long-established carpet needs the backing, the fibre and the wear pattern looked at before anyone decides what to do with it, because the answer is sometimes a clean, sometimes a repair to one area, and sometimes an honest word that it has come to the end. You get whichever of those applies.

Often it is, and you will be told so. New carpet in a lightly used room needs nothing beyond regular vacuuming for a good while yet. Where it does earn an early visit is the hallway, the stairs, and anywhere the front door opens straight onto pile, because that is where grit from outside lands first and starts working on the fibre.

It is worth flagging when you book rather than discovering it on the day. Equipment has to sit close enough for hoses to reach the door, so on a busy road with limited frontage a bit of planning helps. Tell Louis how the front of the property works and whether there is anything usable at the rear of it.

Not reliably, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing. What can be assessed is the fibre, the condition, and how a mark behaves when it is tested. Not knowing what caused it does limit the options, because treatment depends on the substance, so a cautious approach comes first and the result is judged from there before going further.

It is a building problem first, and cleaning a carpet that keeps getting damp will not touch the cause. If moisture is coming from somewhere, that wants sorting before anyone spends money on the floor covering above it. Louis will say if what he is looking at seems like an ongoing damp issue rather than ordinary soiling.

By looking at what is actually there rather than applying a rate to a postcode. Room count, carpet type, condition and access all change the work involved, and two houses on the same road can be entirely different jobs. Describe the rooms honestly when you enquire and you will get a realistic figure rather than a placeholder number.

Not necessarily. A small burn is exactly the sort of localised damage a repair exists for, and relaying a whole room over a patch the size of a hand is an expensive way to fix a small thing. Everything turns on whether matching material can be found, so start by checking for offcuts. Send a photograph and Louis will tell you.

Suitable hard flooring is part of the work, but which surfaces qualify depends on what the floor is made of, and modern houses use a wide range of them. The floor is identified first, because the wrong equipment on the wrong surface causes damage that is far harder to undo than the soil it was meant to remove.

Possibly, and that is worth establishing before anything is applied to it. Older covering can be weakened by age and by sunlight even where it still looks sound, so it is tested somewhere out of sight first. If it is not up to being cleaned, you will hear that rather than watch someone try it and find out the hard way.

One visit where the timing allows it, since the two are handled with different equipment and combining them saves a trip. Give Louis a rough breakdown of which areas are which when you enquire, so enough time is set aside for both. As always, the hard flooring is confirmed as suitable before it goes in the diary.

Ring as soon as you can, and be ready to say where the water came from, roughly how long it sat there, and what it reached. Water travels along carpet backing and into underlay much further than it looks, so the first decisions matter more than anything that follows them. Take photographs straight away in case there is a claim.