A selvedge worn through on the line a piazza door swings across, shredded fringe, a corner the puppy decided was a chew toy, a forty-year-old patch that no longer matches, or a rug that spent a night on a wet floor. Most of it is fixable by hand.
Rug repair is not patching. A proper repair rebuilds the rug the way it was originally made — foundation first, then pile, matched to the original knot density and dye lot — so the repaired section moves, wears and ages at the same rate as everything around it. Done well, you have to be told where it was.
That is slow work. Reweaving is measured in square inches, not square feet, and a hand on a loom is the only tool that does it properly. The upside is that damage most people assume is terminal usually is not. Rugs arrive folded around a hole and go home flat and whole.
Every repair starts with a free assessment and a straight verdict. If the cost of the work is out of proportion to what the rug is worth, we say so instead of taking the job.
From a short fringe tidy to rebuilding a foot of missing border.
Fringe is the end of the rug’s foundation, not decoration, so when it shreds the rug is unravelling. The commonest cause we see is not age, it is a vacuum beater bar taking a few warps a week for ten years. We secure the ends, rebuild lost warps, and replace or re-knot fringe to match the original.
Side cords take the abuse, and in a single house they take it in one place: a rug under a swinging piazza door wears on a line rather than over an area, so the selvedge fails long before the field looks tired. Once it splits, the pile beside it starts letting go. Edges are rewrapped by hand in matched wool.
Burns, tears and worn-through areas are rebuilt knot by knot. The foundation goes back first, then the pile, matched in fibre, colour and density to the field around it.
Charleston houses are full of rugs mended decades ago with whatever wool was to hand, in a room where nobody was going to look closely. Those patches age at their own rate, so they step forward the moment the field around them is cleaned. They can be taken out and rewoven properly — and it is worth knowing they are there before the rug is washed rather than after.
Chewed corners, clawed edges and urine-burnt dye. The rug is decontaminated first, then the missing structure is rebuilt and colour corrected where the original dye was destroyed.
Bleach spots, dye that migrated during a bad cleaning or a soaking, and the pale chalky band along the edge that lay against a masonry wall. Colour is rebuilt by hand where the fibre underneath is still sound.
Rugs cut down to fit a narrow downtown room, or blocked back to square after years of buckling. Cut edges are properly finished so the rug reads as intentional rather than amputated.
Failed latex on hand-tufted rugs, split warps in antiques, and rugs that ripple because the foundation gave way. Cellulose foundations are also the part of a rug that insects go for, so damage found on the back is assessed as a structural problem first. Structure gets fixed before anything cosmetic.
A great many of the repairs we do could have been avoided by a decent pad and a vacuum with the brush switched off. We fit breathable, non-adhesive pads sized to the rug, which matters most in a doorway, where a rug that shifts under a swinging door wears twice as fast.
A supply line behind a washing machine, a water heater at the end of its life, rain driven in along an open piazza, or a floor that was wet-mopped under the rug once a week for a whole letting season. 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. 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.
The slow version does the same damage without ever looking like an emergency. A rug put back onto a floor that was mopped an hour ago is taking water from underneath, and a rug that does that weekly never gets a genuinely dry stretch — the edges nearest the doorways go soft first, and nobody connects it to anything. Either way, 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 on the Charleston and Berkeley route.
The damage is mapped, materials identified, and you get a written price with options. No work starts without your approval.
Repairs go onto a clean rug. Working new wool into a dirty field leaves a visible patch a year later.
Wool selected by fibre, weight and dye lot against the original, and tested against the field before it goes in.
Foundation rebuilt, then pile knotted in at matching density, then sheared to the surrounding height.
Groomed, inspected against the intake photographs, and delivered back to your floor.
Free assessment on every repair, and a real answer about whether it is worth doing.
The six-stage hand wash every rug goes through, and why in-home wand cleaning fails here.
Cleaning processPiazzas, plaster dust, masonry salts and rental turnover — what rug owners here need to know.
Care notesCollection and delivery included across Charleston and Berkeley counties.
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