Two Tips to Follow if You’re Going to Have Your Office’s Carpets Cleaned

Here are two tips to follow if you're going to have a carpet cleaning crew wash your office's carpets.

Prep your office furniture and equipment

Whilst it is best to empty the office of its desks, chairs, paperwork and electrical equipment before the carpet cleaning team arrives, this might not be possible if you don't have any spare storage space for these items. If this is the case, you'll need to prep the items that you need to leave in the office, not only to ensure that the cleaners can access most, if not all of the carpeting, but also so that your office equipment and furniture is not damaged by the carpet cleaning work.

For example, if the office chairs are stackable, you should place them on top of each other and leave them in one corner of the room. Avoid stacking them too high, however, as this might make them difficult for the cleaners to move when they need to wash the carpet underneath them. If it's safe to do so, you may want to put one desk on top of another, to reduce the number of desks that the cleaners have to shift around whilst they're working.

Additionally, you should ensure that all paperwork on the desks is put into the drawers or removed from the office, and you might want to get get some clear plastic coverings for your office's electrical equipment (like the photocopier and any PCs that you cannot remove from the office during the cleaning).

The reason for this is whilst the cleaners will be careful to avoid striking these items with their carpet cleaning machines, some of the water and detergents in these machines might splatter onto the office equipment or any exposed paperwork on the desks during the scrubbing and extraction stages of the cleaning work when the carpet fibres are being agitated. By covering your electrical equipment and hiding the paperwork, you can ensure that the splashes of soapy water don't damage them.

Take steps to air out the washed carpets without opening the windows

If the carpet cleaners take a full day to wash the carpets, you may need to leave the carpeting to dry overnight whilst the office is closed before you can return the desks and equipment to their original places and start using the office again in the morning.

When residential carpets are cleaned, homeowners can often accelerate the drying process by keeping their windows open overnight for added ventilation. However, if your office is in a commercial building, this might not be possible, for security reasons. With this in mind, it might be worth renting a couple of industrial-sized fans (if your office floor space is large) and leaving them running overnight to ensure that the carpets are bone dry, even with the windows closed, and that there will be no chance of the office's reopening being delayed as a result of the floors still being damp.

Contact a carpet cleaning service near you to learn more.