Transparent Pricing
Simple Pricing, Confirmed Before We Start
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Service
|
Price
|
|---|---|
|
Sofa or loveseat |
Number of seats |
|
Sectional |
Number of seats |
|
Armchair, recliner or dining chair |
Per piece |
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Leather furniture |
Per piece |
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Pet odour treatment |
Per affected area |
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Booked with carpet cleaning |
Discounted |
You get the final number before we start. We look at the piece, check the tag, and confirm the price at your door. Nothing gets added without you agreeing to it.
What Changes the Price?
Furniture is priced by the piece and the seat. Three things move it from there.
What it's made of
house Fabric and leather are different jobs with different products. Delicate fabrics and anything the tag marks solvent-only take longer.
What's on it and in it
wrench Body oils on a headrest, pet accidents, set-in spills. Each needs its own treatment before the general clean.
Where you are
checkbox Rates are the same everywhere we go. Jobs outside the Vancouver core carry a higher service minimum to cover travel.
Send us a photo.
One of the sofa and one of the tag under the cushion, and we can usually quote you without a visit.
CHECK THE TAG FIRST
The Letter Under Your Cushion
Nearly every piece of upholstered furniture made in the last few decades carries a cleaning code on a tag, usually under a seat cushion or stapled beneath the frame. One letter, and it determines everything.
- W means water-based cleaning is safe. This covers most synthetics and it's the code we see most often.
- S means solvent only. Water will stain it, shrink it, or leave rings that don't come out. Rayon, some linens and certain silk blends carry this code, and it's the one that ruins furniture when it gets ignored.
- WS means either method works. The most forgiving code there is
-
X means vacuum only, no liquid of any kind. Rare, but it exists, and if your sofa has this code and somebody steam cleans it, that's not a stain you'll be getting out.
Here's why we lead with this rather than bury it in the process section: a rented machine from the hardware store doesn't know what your tag says, and neither does anyone cleaning by habit rather than by assessment. Water on an S-coded fabric is the most common way a good sofa gets wrecked, and it usually happens on a Saturday afternoon with the best of intentions.
If you can find your tag before you call us, tell us what it says. If you can't find it, we'll locate it when we arrive. Some manufacturers hide them in genuinely creative places.
WHAT WE CLEAN
Furniture We Work On
The scope isn't something each company makes up. Technical Safety BC publishes what annual maintenance on a gas fireplace should cover, and we work to that list.
Sofas, loveseats and sectionals
Armchairs, recliners and accent chairs
Dining chairs, usually as a set
Ottomans and footstools
Chaise lounges and daybeds
Headboards
Office and desk chairs
Car and boat interiors, on request
Sectionals get priced as one piece rather than as two or three sofas, which is how some companies do it. And dining chairs in a set are cheaper per chair than one chair on its own, because most of the time is in setting up.
Two things worth mentioning. Cushion covers that unzip are usually not meant to come off, whatever the zip suggests. Wash them separately and they shrink, then they never fit the foam again. We clean them on the cushion.
And if a piece has structural damage, torn fabric or failing foam, cleaning won't hide it and might make it more obvious. We'll say so before we start.
FABRICS
What Your Furniture Is Made Of
The code on the tag tells us the method. The fabric tells us the detail.
Polyester, olefin and microfibre
make up most furniture sold in the last twenty years. Durable, water-safe, forgiving. These are the pieces that come up looking dramatically better.
Microfibre
deserves its own note because it's the one people damage at home. It water-marks easily, and the rings from a spot-clean attempt are often harder to remove than the original spill.
Cotton and linen
absorb more water and dry slower. They're prone to browning if left damp, and linen in particular can shrink at the seams.
Rayon and viscose blends
are the ones most likely to carry an S code. They lose strength when wet and they don't recover.
Velvet
cleans well but the pile has to be set in one direction afterwards or it dries patchy. That's technique, not product.
Wool
wants neutral pH and lower moisture, same as a wool rug. Too much heat and it felts.
LEATHER
Leather Couch Cleaning
Leather isn't fabric and it doesn't get cleaned like fabric. No extraction, no saturation, no steam. The process is closer to caring for a pair of good shoes than to cleaning a sofa.
What goes wrong with leather is predictable. Body oils transfer from skin to the headrest and the arms, they oxidise, and over a few years they darken those areas into a patina that looks like wear but is mostly grime. At the same time the leather itself loses the oils it was finished with, and that's when it starts to stiffen and eventually crack along the seat folds.
So there are two halves to the job. A pH-appropriate clean that lifts the surface oils without stripping the finish, then a conditioner that puts moisture back into the hide. Cleaning without conditioning leaves the leather drier than it was when we arrived, which is why we don't offer one without the other.
The type matters:
1. Pigmented leather, also called protected, is what most furniture uses. It has a surface coating, it’s the most durable, and it handles cleaning well.
2. Aniline and semi-aniline are softer, dyed through rather than coated, and they absorb everything including water. Beautiful and unforgiving. These need a gentler approach and expectations set beforehand.
3. Nubuck and suede have a napped surface and don’t take liquid cleaning at all.
4. Bonded leather is the one to know about. It isn’t hide, it’s leather scrap bonded to a backing with polyurethane on top, and that top layer peels once it starts. No cleaning stops it and no conditioner reverses it. If your sofa is peeling in flakes rather than cracking, that’s bonded leather at the end of its life, and we’ll tell you rather than take your money.
OUR PROCESS
How the Job Runs
Five stages. The order is the part that matters.
Tag and fabric check
Cleaning code first, then fabric type, condition, and any damage. This decides everything else.
Spot test
A small test in a hidden area before anything goes on a visible surface. Colourfastness is not something to find out about in the middle of a cushion.
Dry vacuuming
Crevice work down the sides and back, under the cushions, along the seams. Most of what's in a sofa is dry, and dry soil that meets water becomes a much harder problem.
Pre-treatment
Solution matched to the fabric and the code, applied to traffic areas, headrests, arms and any spots, then left to work.
Cleaning
Hot water extraction where the code allows, low moisture or solvent methods where it doesn't. Upholstery tools are smaller and gentler than carpet tools for a reason.
Grooming
Pile set in one direction, cushions repositioned, fabric left even rather than patchy.
Walkthrough
We go over the piece with you before packing up.
One to two hours for a typical sofa and chair. Sectionals and multiple pieces take longer.
Want cleaner indoor air without the guesswork?
Get a fast, no-obligation quote from our local Vancouver team.
AFTER THE CLEAN
Drying
Two to four hours for most pieces. Thick fabric, dense foam and cushions with a lot of fill take longer, and everything takes longer between October and March when indoor humidity here stays high.
Leave the cushions standing on edge rather than lying flat, so air gets to both sides. Run the HVAC fan rather than opening a window on a wet day. Don't sit on it in jeans until it's fully dry, because dye transfer from denim onto damp upholstery is a real and fairly common way to create a new problem.
If the piece is against a wall, pull it out a foot for the afternoon.
BOOK THEM TOGETHER
Carpet and Upholstery in One Visit
Most people book these together, and there's a practical reason beyond the discount.
Cleaning a sofa moves things. Dry soil comes out of the crevices, some of it lands on the floor, and extraction means moisture in the air around the piece. If the carpet underneath is due anyway, doing the furniture first and the floor second gets you a better result on both than doing either alone.
It's also one appointment instead of two, one set-up, and one call-out fee rather than two.
If you've got area rugs as well, those come under area rug cleaning and we can do all three in the same visit. Tell us what you've got when you call and we'll work out the order.
PETS AND ODOURS
Pets, Odours and the Things That Soak In
A smell that survives vacuuming isn't sitting on the fabric. It's in the foam.
That's the part people miss about upholstery. A sofa is mostly air and foam, and anything liquid that lands on it keeps going until something stops it. Pet urine, a spilled drink, a sick child at two in the morning. The surface dries and looks fine. The foam underneath doesn't.
Which is why surface cleaning brings a smell back within days. The treatment has to reach the depth of the contamination, and with urine that means an enzyme product that breaks the compounds apart rather than covering them, applied to the full area rather than the visible mark.
Sometimes the foam is past saving. A cushion that's been repeatedly soaked over years is a cushion that needs replacing, and no amount of cleaning changes that. When we find one, we'll say so.
Dander and hair are a separate and much easier problem. Both come out with proper vacuuming and extraction, and it's the single biggest improvement most pet owners notice.
STAINS
What Comes Out and What Doesn't
Honest answer: most things, but not everything, and the ones that don't are predictable.
Usually comes out: food and drink spills, body oils, general soiling, pet accidents caught reasonably early, most ink.
Often doesn't: bleach marks, which are colour loss rather than a stain and can't be cleaned back. Sun fading along the side of a sofa that sits by a window. Dye transfer from a new pair of jeans onto a light coloured fabric, which sometimes lifts and sometimes doesn't. Old red wine on a natural fibre. Anything that's already been treated with the wrong product at home, which can set a stain permanently.
That last one is worth a word. If you've hit a spill with a supermarket spot cleaner and it didn't work, tell us which one. Some leave a residue that reacts with professional solution, and it changes how we treat the area.
We assess every stain before we start and tell you what we think will happen. Nobody benefits from a surprise at the end.
