Meredith spent a century and a half making cloth — cotton, wool, hosiery, linen — on the mill yard where the Marketplace shops stand now. We clean the cloth that stayed, which around here means a great deal of good old furniture people would rather keep than replace.
The village grew up around a mill yard and a waterfall. A sawmill went in about 1795 at the outlet where Lake Waukewan drops into Winnipesaukee, a grist mill followed, and a fulling mill was running by 1800. In 1809 a twenty-seven-year-old named John Bond Swasey bought a good share of the village and rebuilt that outlet into a canal running under Main Street and over a forty-foot falls. Everything after that was textiles.
Cotton by 1830. Then the Mechanic Association, and an Englishman named Samuel Hodgson running a hosiery works out of the cotton mill building. Hodgson’s mill burned in 1889 and the site came back as the Meredith Linen Mills, whose coarse linen — “crash” — sold about as fast as they could weave it. Cotton, woolen, hosiery, linen, even asbestos, all on that one yard, until 1984 when somebody turned it into a shopping arcade with the falls in the middle.
We bring it up because of what it says about the houses. Nearly half of Meredith is 55 or older, and the furniture in a village house shows it — a wing chair that was somebody’s mother’s, a wool sofa from before anyone said “performance fabric,” a camp set out on the Neck that has taken thirty summers of wet bathing suits. None of it is replaceable for the price of a cleaning. Most of it doesn’t need to be.
If it was your mother’s, say so before we start. We’ll test longer, use less water, and tell you honestly if the right answer is to leave it be.
First thing we do is find the tag, and then not entirely trust it. W means water-based cleaning is fine. S means solvent only. SW means either will do. X means vacuum and nothing else, ever, and an X-coded chair that somebody wet-cleaned is one of the sadder things we get called out to look at. If the tag is long gone, which is normal on an old piece, we test a hidden patch and go by what the fabric actually does.
Wool and anything that might be a natural fiber gets the careful version: cooler water, gentler chemistry, and a lot less of it, because wool felts and shrinks and does not come back. Silk blends and old rayon we will sometimes decline outright. Loose-weave linen can distort if you push water through it hard, which is a little funny given where we’re standing. Synthetics take a real cleaning and mostly shrug it off.
Then it’s vacuum, pre-treat, hand-agitate, and extract with an upholstery tool instead of a floor wand. Slower. It’s also the only way to control how much moisture goes in. Cushions come out damp and we stand them on edge so air reaches both faces. An ordinary sofa is dry in a few hours; dense foam in a camp sectional can take most of a day, and we’ll tell you that rather than leave you guessing.
A standard sofa runs $90–$150. Chairs and loveseats come in under that. A village-house parlor set, or a camp sectional plus the porch chairs, gets one combined number after we’ve looked at the fabric and put a hand down in the foam. If a piece shouldn’t be wet-cleaned at all, we’ll tell you that for free.
Usually. We test an out-of-sight patch — under a skirt, behind a cushion — and watch what the fabric does with a little moisture and the mildest chemistry we carry. That tells us more than a tag would anyway. If it behaves badly in the test we stop right there and explain why.
Often it’s the only thing worth doing. A frame and springs from that era are usually better built than what you’d replace them with, and the dirt is in the fabric, not the furniture. If the foam has collapsed or the fabric is genuinely worn through, cleaning won’t fix it, and we’ll say so.
Yes, carefully. Wool wants cool water, mild chemistry and as little moisture as will do the job, because heat and saturation make it felt and shrink and there’s no undoing that afterward. It takes us longer and it costs you the same. We’d sooner spend the extra half hour than hand back a shrunken cushion.
That’s usually the upholstery more than the carpet. Foam holds humidity all winter and lets it back out in June. Cleaning the cushions and drying them properly handles most of it. If there’s actual mold growing in the foam, that’s a different problem and cleaning is not the answer to it.
Yes, and we’d rather fold them into a sofa job than bill them as a trip of their own. Outdoor and marine vinyl and acrylic take a firmer cleaning than indoor fabric does. Light-colored outdoor cushions are about the only place we think fabric protector clearly earns its cost.
Flexible scheduling, flat prices quoted up front, and a crew that knows the Lakes Region.
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