Questions to ask before you hand over a valuable rug

Before a rug leaves your house, you want four things established: where it is going, what will be done to it, who is responsible while it is away, and what happens if something goes wrong. The questions below get you all four in one phone call. None of them are trick questions, and a specialist will answer every one of them without hesitating.

1. Where will the rug actually be washed?

You are listening for a specific place: their own facility, at an address they will tell you. "In our plant" is a good answer. "We'll take it back to the shop" is worth following up on — a shop is not necessarily a washing floor. "We do it in your home" is an answer to a different question.

If the work is subcontracted to another company, that is not automatically bad, but you should be told, and you should know who holds the rug.

2. What happens before the water?

The answer you want is dry soil removal — dusting, beating, vibrating, tumbling. If the process starts with wetting the rug, deep grit is still in the foundation when the wash begins.

3. Will you test the dyes first?

Hand-made rugs are not uniformly colourfast. A specialist tests for bleeding before immersing a rug, and adjusts the method to what the test shows. Someone who has no answer to this question is washing every rug the same way.

4. How will it be dried?

Listen for controlled conditions: flat or hung, with moving air, in a space where humidity is managed, and dried to completion before the rug is folded or rolled. A wool rug that stays damp develops odour, and a rug dried unevenly can dry out of shape.

5. How long will you have it?

The useful part of this question is not the number but whether they give you one. A plant that knows its own throughput will tell you a range and explain what would extend it. Rug washing is measured in days.

6. Is the quote final, or an estimate?

A firm price given before anyone has seen the rug is a surface-clean price or a number that will change. Ask what would cause it to change, and ask to be contacted before any extra work is carried out rather than told about it on the invoice.

7. Is my rug insured while you have it?

Ask whether they carry insurance covering customers' goods in their care, and what the limit is. For a rug of real value, ask how the value would be established in a claim — and if you have an appraisal, give them a copy before the rug leaves.

8. Do you make a condition report before work starts?

A specialist inspects the rug on arrival and records what is already wrong with it: thin areas, old repairs, moth damage, dye instability, previous spills. You should be shown this. Pre-existing damage is routinely invisible under soil and becomes obvious once the rug is clean, so the report protects both of you.

9. What will you not do to this rug?

This is the question that tells you the most. Someone who washes rugs for a living will have limits, and will say so: a dye they will not risk, a repair they refer out, a fibre they handle differently, a rug they would decline. An answer of "we can do anything" is not confidence, it is a lack of limits.

Two things to check that are not questions

Their own words. Read the business's website and see whether it describes rug washing specifically, or whether rugs are one line on a carpet-cleaning page. The trade a business actually practises is usually visible in how much it has to say about it.

Certification and membership. Programmes such as WoolSafe and IICRC certification, and membership of rug-care associations, are checkable claims. They do not guarantee workmanship, but they can be verified, and a business claiming one should be able to tell you who holds the certificate and in what.

Before you hand it over

Get the agreed scope, the price basis and the expected timescale in writing, even if it is only an emailed summary. Keep your photographs. If the rug is valuable enough that these questions feel necessary, it is valuable enough that the answers should be on paper.