Great East Lake is a hundred feet deep, clear to thirty, and half in Maine. The houses on it are bigger than the camps on Lovell, and so are the couches. We clean those — and the boat cushions, and the porch set that lived under a tarp since Columbus Day.
Great East is the big one in Wakefield: 1,825 acres, 102 feet at the deepest point, water you can see thirty feet down into, and the town line with Acton, Maine, running right through it — about 55 percent on our side. The main public launch is on the Acton side, which tells you something about how that lake gets used. Boats. Real ones, not canoes. And the houses along the New Hampshire shore have gone year-round and gone large over the last few decades, which means sectionals, oversized chairs, sunroom sets, and a boat’s worth of cushions that come inside every fall.
Here’s the thing about lake-house upholstery nobody warns you about. Sunscreen. It’s an oil, it comes in on every arm and every leg from June to September, it grabs dust, and by August the armrests on the good sofa are two shades darker than the back. Add wet-swimsuit sitting and a dog that just came off the dock. That’s a different soil load than a living room in Sanbornville, and it needs a different pre-treatment.
Winter has its own version. The Seven Lakes Snowmobile Club runs out of East Wakefield with trails into Maine, and the same houses that host swimmers in July host sledders in January — bibs, boots, whatever came off the trail, all of it parked on the couch by the wood stove. So we get called for the same sofa twice a year, and honestly, that’s about right for a lake house that actually gets used.
If you pull the boat in October, stack the cushions inside somewhere dry and have us do them with the couch in the spring — one visit, one quote. Mildew that sets in a cold garage over the winter is a lot harder to get out than sunscreen.
Fabric first. We check the tag and do a quick test in a spot nobody sees, because a lake house is where the odd fabrics live — a linen slipcover, a velvet chair somebody’s mother sent up, an outdoor acrylic that looks like cotton. Then a dry vacuum with the crevice tool down every seam, because that’s where the sand and the dog hair and the potato chips are. Only then does anything wet happen.
Sunscreen and body oil need a degreasing pre-spray, worked into the arms and the headrest and left to sit. Then hot-water extraction with a hand tool, low moisture, lots of dry passes, so the cushion core doesn’t get soaked. Sunscreen that’s been baking in since June won’t all come out in one pass. We’ll say so. Boat cushions get the same treatment on a tarp outside if the weather holds, and we pull the covers if they zip. Dry time is a couple hours for a sofa, longer for a thick cushion — leave them on edge in the sun.
A standard sofa runs $90–$150; loveseats and chairs come in under that. A sectional plus a sunroom set plus the boat cushions gets one combined number, quoted before we start. Fabric protector is optional and worth it on a light couch in a house with a dock.
Sunscreen and skin oil. Both come off arms and legs all summer, both grab dust, and the armrests and headrest take almost all of it. It needs a degreasing pre-treatment, not just hot water, and the worst of it should lift in one visit. Very old buildup sometimes takes two.
Yes, and it’s easiest to do them on the same visit as the couch. Vinyl and outdoor acrylic clean up well; foam that’s been wet and never dried is a judgment call. If the covers zip off, that helps. Bring them inside before we come so they’re not frozen or soaked.
Yes. The town line runs through the lake and we don’t much care which side of it your driveway is on. Give us the road name when you book — some of the shore lanes over there are narrow and we like to know what we’re driving into.
A sofa done low-moisture is usually dry to the touch in two to four hours; thick cushions longer. Open the windows and run a fan, or set cushions on edge in the sun. On a muggy July day we’ll try to book you in the morning so it’s dry by dinner.
If it’s in the fabric, yes. If the dog has been getting up on the couch wet for three summers, some of it is in the cushion foam, and that takes a deodorizing pass and sometimes a second visit. We’ll tell you which you’ve got before we quote it.
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