Thursday, March 24, 2016

Carpet stretching turned bad.

I love the fact at Perfect One Clean we not only offer carpet cleaning and steam cleaning services to our clients, but also carpet stretching and repairs. Yesterday we had a stretch and repair to do.
  • Difficulty of job on a scale of 1-10 a 6
  • Estimated time to do job 1.5 hours
  • Chances of getting injured 0
  • Did I get injured YES!
It never fails that when I think I'm at the point in my career that I don't need to use the same precautions as when I first started I slice a finger. Carpet stretching and carpet repairs can be tricky sometimes because you have to make a lot of cuts and you can always catch your fingers on a tac strip or cut them like I do on the carpet knife. The blades are so sharp that you don't even fill it until its to late.



The first part of this carpet stretching and repair job was a patch that the client tried to fix themselves. They had put a patch in as a circle, and it wasn't seamed in at all it was just loose. It also didn't have any carpet pad under it. So we started from scratch and cut four straight lines around the circle so we could hide the seams good. Cutting straight lined is key when you are trying to hide seams.
So I was able to make it through this with out any blood on the clients carpet. The patch was hardly noticeable and it will look even better after we steam clean her carpets.



The next carpet stretching repair on the carpet didn't go as smooth. It was a challenging repair but nothing that I have not done before. The clients dogs kept scratching at the seam so the carpet was coming apart and you could see the seam tape. Not real appealing when you are trying to sell your home. I took my seam cutter right down the middle of the seam so I could disengage the carpet. After that I had to add carpet to the other side that was against the wall. This allowed me to clean up both sides of the seam and make a brand new one so you couldn't see the
seam line



This is where it got bloody. As I was making my  cut against my straight edge I noticed my thumb was hanging over. As the brand new blade quickly approached my thumb I thought to myself  "I should probably move my THUMB!" To late, "down goes Frazier" my heroic thumb got in the way of that super sharp blade and saved my life. Not really but it sounds better than I made a rookie mistake.


So after I gathered enough tissue to make it upstairs the home owner was kind enough to bandage me up long enough to get to the walk-in clinic. The upside was the walk-in clinic was only three minutes away. The Olathe, KS medical group that I went to did a fantastic job. Here is my review on the Olathe, KS walk in clinic.  Customer service 5 star, wait time short 5 star, treatment time short 5 star, overall experience 5 star.
After all that I was able to go back  and finish the job and also keep all my fingers. On top of that my customer was very pleased with our work.
Perfect One Clean
~Delivering excellent service in every opportunity~

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

IICRC Carpet stretch and repair class



Our mission is to deliver excellent service in every opportunity. One way we do that is by continuing our education
. The carpet cleaning industry is constantly changing with new solutions and equipment, so if you do not stay informed your company and your technicians can get left behind. I am Jordan Owens the Operations Manager for Perfect One Clean. We provide carpet cleaning services for Overland Park, Olathe, and other surrounding areas in the Kansas City area. I recently attended the IICRC class for Carpet Repair and Re-installation. The class included hands on teaching of how to re-stretch existing carpet which we are starting to see more and more of.
There are many factors that can lead to your carpet buckling, such as poor installation, water damage and also general wear and tear among other things. I learned a lot of strategies on how to properly asses the problem and then the techniques used to solve them. Along with re-stretching a big portion of the class was focused on doing repairs such as re-seaming two sections of carpet. To properly re-stretch carpet, a lot of times the best solution is to bust a seam and stretch two rooms towards each other which requires you to know how to re-seam them. However one of the most valuable things I learned from the class is how to do a bonded insert, or a “patch”, the correct way.
These are used in situations where a small section of the existing carpet is beyond repair and the only solution is to cut out the damaged area and re-install a new piece of carpet in that area.

Honestly, this was my favorite technique I learned, because if done properly you can't even tell where the bonded insert is. They give you a lot of time to try the techniques you learned and the proper tools during hands on training. Ever since coming on full time at Perfect One clean I have always enjoyed attending these classes and learning as much as possible about our industry. In the past few weeks since receiving my RRT certification I have already come across quite a few jobs from our clients where I was able to put my newly acquired skills to the test, and have had great success so far.

Above are a couple pictures of a re-stretch job I did in Overland Park, KS. The client wanted to put their house on the market and their Realtor recommended that they have the carpets cleaned and re-stretched. So on this particular job before we did any carpet cleaning we made sure to re-stretch the carpets first. There was one area on the carpet in the hallway were we had to break the seam, re-seam it then stretch it. The client was very happy with the end result.

Part of what our clients like is that along with carpet cleaning we are able to offer other services such as re-stretching and carpet repair. This keeps the client from having to make a bunch of phone calls and appointments. If you are interested in any of our services just click on the link to visit our website. www.perfectoneclean.com.