Love Your Rugs. Keep them Fresh & Fly. Like YOU.
Banana Manor, your 3rd Generation Rug Factory Outlet, brings you the best Safe & Effective Rug Cleaning Solution. Along with easy to follow instructions for how to spot clean or clean your entire rug. Made in New Orleans.
5 RULES FOR KEEPING YOUR RUG LOOKING ITS BEST
- For 100% wool rugs, blot spills right away with Banana Manor Rug Juice. Vacuum on a regular basis with the beater bar off and have your rug cleaned by a professional periodically.
- Rugs made of blended fibers-think wool, viscose and silk blends-vary by construction, but the general guideline is to vacuum regularly sans beater bar and have them professionally cleaned.
- Styles with a high viscose content require extra care-but it’s worth it for that lustrous sheen. To keep your rug in top condition, avoid moisture and place in low-traffic areas. If spills happen, blot immediately and have your rug professionally cleaned as needed.
- Rug made of polyester, recycled PET, acrylic and the like can be cleaned by blotting spills with Banana Manor Rug Juice. Don’t forget to vacuum with the beater bar off.
- For natural rugs, blot stains as soon as possible, spot clean with Banana Manor Rug Juice and vacuum regularly with the beater bar off. If loop or tuft “sprouts” appear, trim with scissors. Do NOT pull them.
HOW TO USE BANANA MANOR RUG JUICE
BEFORE YOU CLEAN YOUR RUG
Washing an entire rug at home will always carry a risk. With at-home washings, low-pile wool rugs—especially multicolor ones—will likely bleed their colors. Some bleeding may not bother most rug owners, myself included, but this is a personal preference.
For spot-cleaning messes, active cleaning time can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Most of the time spent will be passive, like letting the stain remover soak in and waiting for your rug to dry. The drying process can take anywhere from a few hours to a full day, but a fan or cool blow dryer can help speed up the process.
If you decide a rug is safe to wash at home, deep-cleaning the entire thing can take the better part of a day. But the active cleaning time shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. Drying a rug, one of the most important steps, can take a few days, depending on your climate and how thick a rug is. With some smaller flatweave rugs that you can toss in the washer, the process is much easier. But you’ll still have to air-dry most of them.
PREPARATION
To start, you should remove the excess dirt that is only loosely clinging to the rug so that you don’t rub it deeper into it while scrubbing later on. Take the rug outside when the weather is clear and lay it over some chairs, a porch rail, or a clothesline to let it hang. Having done this, hit the rug across its surface with a broom or rug beater made just for this task to get the dirt to fall out. Since you’re outside, you can easily sweep away the debris on the ground afterward if needed.
Bring the rug back inside and spread it flat with its bottom side facing an area where your flooring will not be damaged by the cleaning. To illustrate, you might avoid the room where you normally place the rug because it has a water-sensitive wood floor. A place like the kitchen may be preferable since the tiles there are unfazed by most substances, including the cleaning agent and water you will use on the rug. With a suitable location picked, vacuum the rug’s bottom side and then flip it over and vacuum its top side as well. The goal is to get rid of the last remnants of dirt and dust that might still come off so that the subsequent steps can proceed smoothly.
CLEANING
Now you’re ready to get to the real cleaning. Put on a pair of dishwashing gloves, get (2) buckets and pour in (1) Gallon of Banana Manor Rug Juice in one bucket and plain water in the other bucket. Take a sponge, soak it in the Banana Manor Rug Juice, and wring it free of most of the liquid. Lightly rub a small section of the rug with a sponge to make sure that its colors will not bleed. If they don’t start to run, you can safely proceed with cleaning.
If a mess contains any solids (like food, vomit, and the like), remove those first. Then use a clean white towel to blot the stain and remove as much liquid as possible.
Scrub the top surface of the rug softly using the Banana Manor Rug Juice. Apply enough pressure so that the sponge can absorb the grime, but not so much that you drench the rug to the core, as this will make drying it more difficult. It is best to work in sections rather than scrub widely over the length of the rug in order to ensure that you don’t accidentally miss a portion of the rug. Divide the rug up into manageable portions in your mind and work within each, one at a time.
After this, get a second sponge and wet it with the plain water from the second bucket. Dab the entire rug with this sponge to effectively wash it free of the detergent. Just as you did the first time around while applying the soapy water, move along section by section and try not to make the rug too damp.
DRYING
You can aid the drying process by bringing over several white towels to soak up the water held within the wool fibers. Press down gently in dabbing motions without rubbing the towels against the rug in side-to-side motions. When one towel becomes saturated with water, you should switch to a dry one and repeat this process however many times you need to until you have covered the entire face of the rug.
At this point, you’ll be finished with the cleaning, and all you will have left to do is to allow the rug to dry naturally. You may leave it on the floor and open up a window to let air circulate throughout the area. Otherwise, you can hang it up again outside so it has even more exposure to the air and can dry more quickly. Lay the rug flat and let it air-dry completely, which may take a couple of days, depending on your climate. Turn the rug over after a few hours to let both sides dry. Setting fans around the rug can help speed up the process and deter bleeding on wool rugs.
You’re now ready to take care of your wool rugs since you are armed with Banana Manor Rug Juice and know how to use it!
