So while it’s still in season, here are some cleaning services that Steamer’s offers to help jumpstart your own spring cleaning.

Air Duct Cleaning

What’s more appropriate to spring than air duct cleaning? Air ducts collect dander, dust, pollen and those pesky allergens that have everyone sneezing from March to May. Getting your air ducts cleaned can improve the overall air quality in your home. During every air duct cleaning, we remove and sanitize the register covers that collect the nasty particles floating around your home. Then we brush, vacuum, clean the air ducts themselves with our ROTOBRUSH system. If necessary, we also offer duct sanitation services.

Tile and Grout Cleaning

Grout cleaning in the kitchen is messy and time consuming work. Grout cleaning in the bathroom, however, can be just plain nasty. Why bother spending half a day on the bathroom floor when Steamer’s offers professional grade grout and tile cleaning services? With our specially formulated cleaning solution and high-pressure, hot water washing we can restore tile and grout to their original shine. Moreover, we also offer a sealant for your grout that makes it more resistant to future spills and dirt.

Carpet Cleaning

This might seem obvious, but cleaning the carpets really is an important part of any overall home cleaning process. Our 9-step carpet cleaning process is the cornerstone of our company and our most popular service. Having clean carpets can greatly improve the entire feel of the entire house. No matter how much you vacuum the couch cushions or wipe down the windows, if there’s a big, brown coffee stain on the living room carpet, the whole room looks pretty unsavory.

Stop fixing to get ready to get started with the spring cleaning and contact Steamer’s today. We may not be able to sort through the boxes in your attic but we can give you that helpful push to start picking up the house. Once the cleaning ball starts rolling, it tends to keep on going.

While a number of knock-off “Persian rugs” can be purchased from China or India, a real Persian rug is made in the area of the world once known as Persia and now part of the country of Iran. Recently, however, Iran hasn’t been faring too well with Western countries which purchase a good number of its rugs.

In 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush declared that Iran was part of an Axis of Evil which also included Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s pre-invasion Iraq. In 2006 tensions were ratcheted up more when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Iranian scientists had successfully enriched uranium for the nation’s supposed nuclear energy program. One consequence of these deteriorating relations has been the implementation of sanctions on Iranian goods.

Sanctions certainly aren’t new to the Persian rug industry. In fact, Persian rugs were banned by the United States throughout the 1990s until President Bill Clinton took the rugs off the ban list in a goodwill gesture. In 2010, however, the goodwill ended and the rug loophole was closed again—this time even more tightly. Persian rugs can’t even be imported into the United States from a third country.

The E.U. meanwhile has its own sanctions on Iranian products and services. Though rugs may still be purchased, starting July 1^st, the E.U. will be banning Iranian oil imports. The E.U. has also blacklisted a number of Iranian banks and in March, Belgian-based SWIFT, the world’s largest electronic payment system decided to expel those banks from its services. Now rug producers are having trouble accepting or receiving payments. Without the ability to hold online financial transactions, Iranian rug companies have essentially been cut off from the world.

Critics of the U.S. and E.U. sanctions say that putting embargos on the rugs hurts the people who make the rugs more than the government. Instead of stopping the nation’s nuclear program, the sanctions may be stopping a rural Iranian mother from putting food on the table. On the other hand, Persian rugs are one of Iran’s largest exports and the struggles of the industry may encourage Tehran to be more careful.

Whether you agree with the sanctions or not, it’s unlikely that we here in the United States will be seeing new Persian rugs anytime soon. Relations between the U.S. and Iran are downright cold and the temperature just keeps on dropping. Maybe you could find a more simple, modern rug design for your living room or hallway. Maybe you could go with hardwood. Or maybe those Chinese knockoffs aren’t looking so bad after all?

But if you do have any type of Oriental rug or Persian rug that needs cleaning, contact Steamer’s Carpet Care today.

Chimney cleaning, unfortunately, has a rather ugly past. Chimney sweeping became a popular service in England at the beginning of the British Industrial Age in the late 18^th century. A growing urban population meant that more houses needed to be built and consequently, more chimneys swept out. Because the chimney flues were so narrow, however, the sweeping couldn’t be done by adults but rather became the task of children.

Poor young boys were the most common “chimney sweeps” in London and other English cities. They would roam the streets from morning till night and call out their services to the neighbors. Anyone who needed to have their chimney swept would invite them inside.

An adult “master” chimney sweep would accompany the boys, some of whom were as young as four, and force them to crawl up into the narrow flues with a brush. The climbing boy would then sweep the soot off the walls of the chimney above him. This falling soot was gathered in a blanket at the bottom of the fireplace and could be sold later on.

Obviously, the occupational hazards of chimney sweeps were enormous. Boys often would become stuck in the flues for hours and could suffocate to death if not pulled out in time. Boys also suffered from scraped knees and arms as they went up the flues. Sometimes the chimney could still be hot from a recent fire and the boys would emerge from a job with burns and blisters. General neglect of the boys’ wellbeing was rampant as well. Many were stunted in their growth and quite a few suffered from a form of genital cancer known as “chimney sweeps cancer.”

The first attempt to regulate chimney sweep working conditions came in 1788 with the Chimney Sweepers Act. The law tried to limit each master sweeper to only six apprentice sweeper boys. All the boys, it said, had to be at least eight years old. The law lacked enforcement, however, and was generally ignored.

The Chimney Sweepers Act of 1834 made the first positive steps towards ensuring the safety of apprentice chimney sweeps. The act set the minimum age of climbing boys at 14. Moreover, boys could not be simply given to masters but had to go before a magistrate to express their desire to become a sweep. Master sweeps were again limited to six apprentices. This law was better enforced than the previous attempt yet was still widely ignored.

More regulations were passed throughout the 19^th century but it wasn’t until the Chimney Sweepers Act of 1875 that abuses really ended. The 1875 act required that all chimney sweeps had to be authorized by the police to practice in their districts. This brought the legal means through which previous legislation could be enforced.

Today, thankfully, modern technology has eliminated the need for climbing boys. Rather, all chimney cleaning is done by a trained professional who uses a variety of tools including vacuums, cameras and long-necked brushes.

If you need chimney cleaning or other cleaning services for your home, contact Steamer’s today.

General wisdom dictates that any rug will eventually unravel, collect stains and become a household eyesore. Not the Yachiyo metal rug, however says London designer Pilippe Malouin. The Yachiyo rug is composed of thousands of tiny metal rings all looped together into a hexagon. Basically, it’s a sheet of chain mail. The patterning of the loops follows the Japanese ’12-in-2’ chain mail style which consists of 2 central rings with 12 perpendicular rings connected around it.

Yachiyo Rug

The rug apparently took 3,000 hours to make and was diligently attended to by a team of interns and assistants in Malouin’s studio. The name “Yachiyo” is actually the name of the Japanese intern who worked on the project from day one. The process, says Malouin, requires extensive hand-manufacturing and could not possibly be replicated by a machine. The Yachiyo rug, it seems, is one of a kind.

Yachiyo Rug

Another key feature of the rug is that it resembles a three dimensional prism from any angle. Though the surface of the rug is obviously two dimensional, at first glance the rug could be mistaken for a little pedestal sitting on the floor.

Yachiyo Rug

Though we probably won’t ever see the Yachiyo rug popping up in home furnishing catalogues, the original may one day find a good home in a museum. For those of us who don’t live in the MOMA or Guggenheim, however, carpet cleaning and upkeep will continue to be a fact of life.

If you’ve got non-metal, normal rugs that didn’t require three thousand hours of hand labor to create, contact Steamers Carpet Care today to schedule a carpet cleaning with one of our professional carpet care technicians.

But perhaps my favorite use of the magic carpet is in poet Shel Silverstein’s book A Light in the Attic. One of the poems in the book reads:

Magic Carpet

You have a magic carpet
That will whiz you through the air,
To Spain or Maine or Africa
If you just tell it where.
So will you let it take you
Where you’ve never been before,
Or will you buy some drapes to match
And use it
On your
Floor?

Like many of Silverstein’s poems, “Magic Carpet” has appeal for both child and adult audiences. In the one sense, it encourages children to go on their own imaginary adventures. In another sense, it calls on adults to reclaim their childlike sense of wonderment with life’s ordinary objects. After all, why shouldn’t a carpet be magical? Why should it just be a home fixture?

Steamer’s Carpet Care offers carpet cleaning for both magical and non-magical rugs. Mostly we serve the San Antonio area, but Spain, Maine and Africa are available upon request. Contact us today.

David Hanauer’s new area rugs are printed with satellite images taken from Google Earth. Anyone who’s toured around Google Earth before can easily spot the suburban housing developments, highways, parking lots and parks all seen from space.

The images are arranged in repeating patterns that resemble contemporary Persian rugs. In fact, if not studied closely the rugs could be mistaken for simple spinoffs of old geometric designs that stretch back thousands of years. Hanauer claims that the Persian rug design was actually his inspiration. He was not, he says, trying so much to make a statement on technology but rather trying to modernize an ancient style.

The project began when Hanauer was a student at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany. Now, however, it looks as though it may be a very lucrative business venture. Currently, one of his rugs is on sale for 400 euros at a top designer store in Berlin.

Pictured below are a couple of our favorites from the project:

City of Hope

Highway

The term “carpetbaggers” first originated after the Civil War. The fallout from the war had left the nation divided and though the southern states had surrendered, they still needed to rejoin the Union. In 1865, radical, northern Republicans in Congress refused to seat southern representatives. The Congress instead decided to implement a number of policies now known as “Reconstruction.”

Southern states were put under military control in 1867. Their constitutions were rewritten to include African American suffrage and northern troops oversaw elections to ensure fairness. Between 1865 and 1877, the year that Reconstruction officially ended, a number of northerners moved into southern states to oversee and aid the Reconstruction effort. Their belongings were often carried in a common form of luggage called “carpet bags.” Carpet bags were (and still are) made of carpet patterned like oriental rugs. They were known for their extreme durability as well as their ability to provide a warm blanket for chilly railway cars.

These “carpetbaggers” as the northerners came to be known, were widely despised by southern locals who saw them as meddlesome figures in local politics as well as opportunists exploiting the weakened southern economy. Carpetbaggers were accused of buying up plantations at cheap-prices and forcibly wresting southern businesses from local control. Carpetbaggers were also unpopular for their openly abolitionist agendas. While African Americans had been technically freed, very few southerners were in favor of granting them any further rights or privileges.

While the term “carpetbagger” isn’t heard much anymore, it can be used in modern American English to describe any politician who runs for office in an area where he or she has no community ties. The modern carpet bag still has a reputation for durability though isn’t typically made of carpet anymore. Caring for your carpet bag may require more effort than the occasional vacuuming. If you have questions about real carpet care, however, contact Steamer’s Carpet Care today.

Anthropologists believe that the Navajo people first migrated to the Southwest from Canada between 1300 and 1500. They probably picked up rug weaving from their nearby neighbors and frequent enemies the Pueblo Indians who had been importing cotton from Mexico to make rugs since the 9^th century. With the arrival of Spanish settlers in the Southwest, many Pueblo groups were forced to flee into Navajo territory and brought their centuries worth of weaving knowledge straight into the Navajo heartland. The Spanish were also instrumental to the Navajo rug for introducing the Churro sheep to the Americas. This new species of sheep produced an easy-to-spin wool that was more durable than traditional cotton.

After the Santa Fe Trail opened in 1822, traders began trickling into Navajo lands and purchasing the woven blankets to sell back East. It wasn’t until railroads reached Navajo lands in the 1880s, however, that Navajo textiles became a true boom business. Navajo rugs began to be featured in catalogs and influential traders demanded certain styles that would appeal to white audiences.

Today an authentic Navajo rug is an expensive commodity selling for well over $900 in many cases. Machine-made copies can be purchased for less but they often lack the durability of originals.

With proper care, a true Navajo rug will literally last a lifetime. Navajo rugs are best cleaned with a vacuum but should never be washed like other area rugs. If your rug needs a thorough wash, it’s imperative that you find an experienced Navajo rug cleaning technician. Just rinsing a Navajo rug in water will fade color and reduce a valuable artwork to little worth.

To learn more about how to care for Navajo rugs and other carpets, contact Steamers Carpet Care today.

Before the 20^th century, painting was dominated by the notion that the artist should accurately depict 3D space. Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian mastered the arts of shading and painting in perspective. Their figures, buildings and spaces were drawn to mimic reality. Every hand, foot and face was meticulously crafted to look like the hands, feet and faces you might see outside.

In 1908, however, Paris-based artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso made a bold break with the masters of the Renaissance. They abandoned this notion that painting had to portray reality as it actually appeared. Rather, the subjects of their paintings were drawn as the artists imagined them. Instead of sketching realistic figures, Picasso and Braque broke up, or abstracted, their subjects into little geometric shapes. A nose became a triangle, an arm, a rectangle, and a head, a square. One critic called the paintings a collection of “strange cubes” and thus the term “Cubism” was born.

Later artists took Braque and Picasso’s interest in geometry and abstraction even further. In 1915, Russian avant-garde painter Kazimir Malevich began to form compositions composed of colored geometric shapes set against a white background. His famous “Black Square” was simply that, a black square. In only a few short years, art had gone from representing reality to total abstraction.

Artists throughout the 20th century would continue to pursue geometric forms. In the 1930s Dutch painter Piet Mondrian created a number of famous compositions with red, blue, yellow and white squares separated by thick black lines. In the 1950s, Russian-American artist Mark Rothko covered gigantic canvases with three stacked rectangles of different colors. Today both of these artists’ works can be found in museums throughout the world.

While modern area rugs may not actually resemble Picasso paintings, Picasso’s ideas about art are certainly behind them. Many modern rugs use geometric patterns to give spaces a sense of freshness and life. The sharp, crisp lines of squares and rectangles tend to contrast nicely with plush couches or other furniture. At the same time, single-colored geometric figures are also calming and can provide hectic spaces with a simplistic order.

While it probably isn’t a good idea to shop for an area rug that resembles a Picasso, Mondrian or Rothko painting, it can’t hurt to channel some of the greatest artists of our time when considering home design.

First and foremost, carpets don’t cause allergies, allergens cause allergies. Allergens are substances that the immune systems of certain people identify as dangerous. For other people, however, the exact same substance can have no effect at all. When an allergic individual comes into contact with an allergen, his or her body begins to fight against it. This natural defense is known as an allergic reaction.

Carpeting in your home acts as a trap for outdoor allergens tracked in on shoes and pets. Dust mites, mold and pet dander can become stuck in carpeting and sometimes take months to leave. While this may sound like a good reason to put in wood floors, trapping allergens is often a good thing. Wood and tile flooring allows allergens to become airborne when you sweep or walk around. Carpeting meanwhile, keeps dirt and mites on ground level, giving you cleaner, healthier air to breathe up above.

Carpeting’s ability to trap allergens also means that you can eliminate indoor allergies with regular vacuuming. Carpet only becomes an allergen hotbed if it’s not taken care of.

To keep your carpets truly allergen-free and fresh, we recommend a professional carpet cleaning every 12 to 18 months. If you would like to schedule a carpet cleaning with Steamers, call our office today!