Real jobs from homes in Raleigh, Charlotte and the towns around them. Each one shows the piece, what was wrong with it, how we cleaned it, and the photos from that visit.
Here our team in Charlotte had a long cream sectional that still looked fine from a distance, until you looked at the seats. Up close, the cushions people use most had gone gray, and the chaise had a dull patch right in the middle.
A curved four-seat sectional in cream bouclé, the kind of sofa that is the centerpiece of the room. Its seats had slowly turned from cream to gray, and on a fabric this light, that shows.
White dining chairs look great until the first meal. This job for our team in Charlotte was a full set of white slipcovered dining chairs, and nearly every seat had collected its own scatter of small dark specks and smudges.
A hallway takes more steps than almost any room in the house. This one, a job for our team in Raleigh, had the proof: a dark brown lane running straight down the middle of a beige carpet.
A full row of tufted dining chairs, and every seat had its own collection of marks: rings, drips, scattered spots and, on one chair, a large dark stain right in the middle.
A living room area rug with a gray leaf pattern on a light field, about 88 square feet of synthetic pile under a sectional and a coffee-table ottoman.
This job for our team in Raleigh was a bare white mattress with yellow and brown stains scattered across the sleeping surface. Stains like these build up quietly under the sheets and only show once the bed is stripped.
White leather looks spotless in the showroom and shows every day of use at home. This six-seat reclining sectional had reached that point: the seats had turned a dingy gray-yellow, while the backs were still close to white.
