Torn edges, missing fringe, moth grazing along the side that lives under the dining table, a corner the puppy decided was a chew toy, or a rug that spent a night in creek water. Most of it is fixable by hand.
Patching a rug and repairing one are different trades. A repair puts the rug back together in the order it was built: warps and wefts first, then knots tied at the same density in wool matched for fibre, weight and dye lot. Get that right and the mended area takes wear at the same rate as the field beside it, which is the only reason a repair stays invisible instead of surfacing as a shiny patch two winters later.
None of it is quick. A reweave is priced and planned in square inches, because a pair of hands at a loom is still the only thing that does the job. What that buys you is range: very little that arrives here is actually beyond saving, whatever the person carrying it in has already decided.
Assessment is free and the verdict is blunt. Where the bill would run up against what the rug is worth, you will hear that first, and we would rather lose the work than quietly spend your money on it.
From a short fringe tidy to rebuilding a foot of missing border.
Fringe is not trim — it is the warp of the rug coming out of the end. Losing it means the rug is coming undone from the edge inward. The ends get secured, missing warps rebuilt, and fringe re-knotted or replaced to match what was there.
The wrapped side cords absorb everything a vacuum head and a chair leg can do to a rug, and when one splits the knots next to it start walking free. Sides are rewrapped by hand in matched wool before that spreads.
Scorches, splits and areas worn through to the backing are put back a knot at a time. Warp and weft are rebuilt first so the hole has something to sit in; only then does the pile go back, matched for colour, fibre and knot count.
Moth larvae eat wool from underneath, so by the time bare foundation shows there is usually an active problem. We treat the infestation, then reweave the grazed areas. The classic find here is the rug under a dining table in a room that is kept shut and closed off from the cooling all summer — dark, still and undisturbed is exactly the condition they want.
Corners treated as chew toys, edges opened up by claws, and dye burnt out from underneath by urine. Decontamination comes first — there is no point reweaving into a contaminated foundation — then structure, then colour where the dye is gone for good.
Sun-bleached bands where the afternoon light lands, bleach spots, iron staining left by red clay, and dye that migrated during a bad cleaning or a soaking. Colour is rebuilt by hand where the fibre is still sound.
Narrowing or shortening a rug to suit a room, and pulling a buckled one back to square on the blocking frame. A cut edge gets a finished side cord, so the result looks like a decision rather than an accident.
Delaminated latex under a tufted rug, cotton warps gone brittle with age, and rugs that will not sit flat because the structure underneath has stretched or torn. Nothing cosmetic happens until the frame of the rug is sound again.
A great many of the repairs we do could have been avoided by a decent pad. We fit breathable, non-adhesive pads sized to the rug — which matters most on a wood floor over a crawlspace, where a solid rubber pad seals in the moisture rising from below and holds it against the foundation right through the season.
Damp is a shoulder-season problem in Columbia rather than a summer one. 141 days a year sit at or above 75% relative humidity and 87 of those reach 80%, but they are bunched into spring and fall, with 48 days over ninety degrees in between and 22 freezing nights at the far end. Rugs here are damaged by the transitions more than by either extreme.
141 damp days a year, 32 days at the longest stretch, 48 days over ninety degrees and 22 nights at freezing: Columbia distributes its moisture across spring and fall and takes it away in between.
Twice a year, then, a rug's foundation takes up moisture over several weeks and gives it back over several more, while the wool pile lags behind it both times.
87 of those damp days reach 80% relative humidity, where mold stops needing much time, so the risk is real without being constant — and rugs that sit undisturbed through one of those windows are the ones that surprise their owners.
The housing descriptions for Shandon, Wales Garden and Lake Carolina all mention crawlspaces, and a crawlspace is the reason a rug can be damaged from a direction nobody inspects.
Soil under an unvented crawlspace gives up moisture into the void, that moisture moves up through the floor, and the rug on top of it acts as the lid. The foundation loads from beneath while the pile stays dry to the touch.
In Lake Carolina, Blythewood and Irmo the rugs are mostly on slab, which behaves nothing like a joisted floor.
A slab is in direct contact with ground moisture and, in older construction, often has no vapor barrier under it; a rug laid straight onto one is being wetted from below continuously rather than seasonally, and the cotton foundation is the part in contact with it.
The oldest housing on the collection route goes back to the 1900s, and construction of that age was not built to keep ground moisture out of the rooms above it — which is worth remembering before blaming a rug's condition on the rug.
Cellulose held damp loses strength, and 32 unbroken days above 75% is long enough for it to matter.
A foundation going that way gives no cosmetic warning, so the test is mechanical: fold a corner and see whether it flexes or crackles, and pull gently on a fringe tassel to see whether it is still anchored in anything.
Fringe is the warp ends of the rug, not a trim, so 141 days a year of damp working on cotton warps shows up there before it shows up anywhere else.
Once the ends let go the rug starts unravelling from the edge inward, which is why a fringe that has begun to shed is worth dealing with while it is still a fringe job.
Hand-tufted rugs are held together by adhesive and a cloth backing rather than by knots, and 48 days a year over ninety degrees combined with 141 damp days is hard on that construction.
It fails as a fine grit that comes out of the back, a backing that lifts away from the body of the rug, and a smell that returns after cleaning because the source is the adhesive layer rather than the pile.
Figures above are from the ERA5 reanalysis record for the five years from 2021 through 2025, taken at the center of the the Midlands service area. If what you are seeing on your rug matches any of this, send photographs and we will tell you which of these it is.
A creek out of its banks, a thunderstorm the storm drains could not take, a supply line behind a washing machine, or a crawlspace that filled and pushed damp up through the floorboards. The rug on that floor is now on a clock.
Wool survives being wet surprisingly well. What it does not survive is staying wet. In a warm room mould establishes in a saturated foundation in roughly forty-eight hours, and once it is at the base of the pile you cannot vacuum, spray or air-dry it back out. From May to September the rooms in this city are always warm enough. Meanwhile unstable dyes start migrating, cotton foundations begin to rot, and whatever the water picked up on the way in is curing into the rug.
Creek and river water is worse again. It carries silt, sewage and whatever was on the lawns, driveways and roads it crossed, and along Gills Creek and the Congaree that is a documented local risk — in October 2015 Gills Creek crested at 17.08 feet against a previous record of 9.43 feet, eighteen dams failed across the state, and Columbia went onto a boil-water advisory. Contamination has to be washed out in immersion. A fan pointed at a wet rug is not restoration: it dries the surface, locks the contamination into the foundation, and produces a rug that smells fine for three weeks and then does not.
Send pictures of the damage, or we collect the rug at no charge anywhere in Richland and Lexington counties.
Damage is measured and mapped, materials identified, and you get a written price with the options laid out. Nothing begins until you say yes to one of them.
The wash comes before the loom. New wool set into a soiled field is a clean patch in a dull rug, and it only gets more obvious with age.
Replacement wool is chosen against the original for fibre, weight and dye lot, then laid on the field in daylight before a single knot is tied.
Warp and weft go back first, then knots at the original density, then the new pile is sheared down level with what surrounds it.
Groomed out, checked against the photographs taken at intake, and carried back in and laid down for you.
Every repair is assessed free, and you get an honest answer about whether the work is worth the money.
The six stages of the hand wash, and why a wand run over a rug on a Columbia floor makes things worse.
Cleaning processHeat, crawlspaces, pollen, sand and clay — what rug owners here need to know.
Care notesCollection and delivery included across Richland and Lexington counties.
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