Gunstock has been running people down 227 acres of mountain since the WPA finished building it in 1937, and every one of them drives home through Gilford with the mountain still on their boots. We clean the carpet that catches it. Flat price, told to you before we start.
Gunstock is the thing that makes Gilford different from every other town on this lake. It’s county-owned — Belknap County, not a resort chain — and it’s been running since the WPA finished it in 1937. Forty-four trails, 227 skiable acres, plus the tubing hill and the Nordic side. Then a 420-site campground that fills right back up the minute the snow’s gone. The place never really closes, and neither does the traffic on 11A.
What that means for a floor: Gilford carpet works twelve months a year. December through March it’s wet boots and the fine grit the plow trucks leave behind, ground into the mat by the door and then walked down the hall. April and May it’s mud, the real kind, off the dirt roads up in Gunstock Acres. Summer it’s sand and bug spray. We’ve pulled enough of it out of enough houses up there to know which spots go first — it’s the stair runner and the six feet inside the door. Always is.
Most of our winter calls here come from two kinds of places. Chalets and condos up the Acres that host a different family every weekend from Christmas through March. And regular year-round houses where somebody skis, which around here is most of them. Different budgets. Same dirt.
If you ski, buy a real entry mat — the stiff-bristle kind, outside the door, not the thin rubber one inside it. Most of what we pull out of Gilford carpet in April never had to come through the door in the first place.
Dirt sits there. Salt doesn’t. Road salt is hygroscopic, which is a long word meaning it pulls water out of the air — so a carpet that’s been collecting it since December stays faintly damp down at the base of the pile on every humid day, and it keeps re-wetting itself long after your boots dried. That’s the white crust you see in March. It’s also why a shop-vac and a spray bottle don’t fix it. You lift the crust off the top and leave the rest sitting on the backing.
The fix is flushing, not scrubbing. We pre-vacuum slowly first, because the sand that came in alongside the salt is abrasive and we want it out before anything gets wet. Then a pre-spray on the entry and the traffic lanes, a little agitation, and truck-mounted hot water pushed through and pulled straight back out. That’s what carries dissolved salt out of a carpet instead of just moving it around in there. We groom the pile afterward so it dries standing up rather than matted flat.
Best month for it is April, once you’re done tracking in for the season. Do it in January and you’ll just be doing it again.
A whole house runs $150–$350 depending on rooms, stairs, and how bad the entry is. One room, around $45. Stairs out of a ski chalet count as their own job and we’ll say so in the quote. You get the flat number before we start.
April, if you only do it once. By then the last of the road salt and the mud off the dirt roads is in there and the season’s done, so it stays clean. If you rent the place out every weekend, a mid-season cleaning makes sense too — just plan on doing it again in spring.
Usually, yes. Most places up the Acres empty Sunday afternoon and fill again Friday, which gives us room. Book a few weeks out for February vacation week. That one gets tight, and so does the stretch between Christmas and New Year’s.
Almost never. That haze is salt that crystallized back out of the fibers — not a stain, not a dye problem. Hot water extraction dissolves it and pulls it out. What actually does permanent damage is the sand underneath it, grinding at the fibers every time somebody walks through.
We do. The truck-mount stays down at the road if it has to and we run hose in, which is normal for us. If a road is genuinely impassable we’ll tell you and reschedule rather than tear it up or get stuck in your yard. April is our busiest month in Gilford for exactly that reason.
Four to six hours in socks for most Gilford houses. Open a window, run a fan, it goes quicker. Humid days down on the lake side of town slow it, so if you need it dry by a certain hour, say so and we’ll put you first on the schedule.
Flexible scheduling, flat prices quoted up front, and a crew that knows the Lakes Region.
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