Keep it Clean – it’s Valentine’s Day!

When you’re preparing for that romantic Valentine’s night in for you and your significant other, you might be thinking about the meal you’re planning, the expensive wine and the perfect flowers, or perhaps how your evening of romance might progress later on. The last thing you’ll probably be thinking about is cleaning.

Inviting your beloved back to a less than fresh house isn’t likely to impress, though. You might have got used to that stain on the carpet, or be able to ignore the dirty looking sofa, but how can you expect to snuggle up for that soppy date on a sofa that has to be disguised with a badly-matched throw that your mum gave you, just because it looks so bad? If your living room looks like an unkempt disaster area complete with aged stains and a musty smell, the prospect of your beau wanting to investigate your bedroom will be drastically reduced.

We know how it is though – you just don’t have time to give the whole place a thorough spring clean before you light the scented candles and open the wine. You’re already panicking about what to wear, and the thought of attempting to scrub months-old coffee stains out of the carpet really isn’t appealing. Besides, you need to get your hair done.

That’s where a professional carpet and upholstery cleaner could save the day. Imagine how impressed your potential lover will be when he or she walks into a fresh, clean smelling home, and looks around to see the immaculately-laid table, bouquet of expensive flowers and bottle of classy wine waiting. Not to mention you, in your best clothes with a serene smile on your face.

You can feel happy in the knowledge that your Valentine won’t be afraid to get a bit closer to your upholstery - because it will be clean and fresh. You might even find that the gorgeous clean carpet attracts some closer inspection if you’re lucky!

One word of advice though. Even if you’ve gone the whole way and called in expert carpet and upholstery cleaners like 1st Choice Chemdry to make sure that everything is just so for your romantic night in, it’s probably not a good idea to insist that all wine glasses stay on the table, or stare at your beloved while they eat, just to make sure they don’t spill anything on your newly perfect carpets…

Keeping your hotel spotlessly clean

Experts like Alex Polizzi, The Hotel Inspector, know that keeping your hotel looking spotless doesn’t stop at reception or the dining room – if you want to make a really good impression, and gain that all-important repeat business,  your bedrooms need to be up to standard at all times.

Bed linen needs to be beautifully fresh and clean, and anyone who regularly watches ‘Four in a Bed’ will know how particular many guests are when it comes to the finer details. Keep that grouting clean, make sure the bathroom is sparkling and dust every bedroom regularly if you don’t want to lose marks for cleanliness. Carpets are a major area where a hotel or guest house can fall down – you might think that your guests won’t notice that stain on the bedroom carpet, but many reviews on sites like TripAdvisor mention dirty carpets, and mark hotels down for it. It’s well worth keeping on top of your carpet cleaning if you want to make a good impression on your guests.

We all know that hotel guests can be messy. A chocolate, coffee or red wine stain can be difficult to remove if you don’t notice it until the following day, even with cleaning products which are specifically intended for carpet stains. If you attempt to remove a difficult stain with a standard carpet cleaning product but you don’t manage to remove all of it, you can end up sealing what’s left of the problem stain into the carpet fibres so that even when you ask a professional carpet cleaner like 1st Choice Chemdry in to tackle the problem, it might refuse to budge.

There are several different tips and tricks for emergency treatment of stains, but our advice is simple: just treat spillages of wine, coffee or any other liquids immediately soak up as much of the liquid as possible with a clean, dry cloth and keep the stain damp with a wet towel while you call in a carpet cleaning expert. It’s a lot easier to shift a tough stain if it’s still damp.

1st Class Chemdry were called in by the fabulous (and very stern) Alex Polizzi to help spruce up a failing hotel in the new series of Channel 5’s The Hotel Inspector. You can see our handiwork on the show, which airs at 9pm on 13th February.