Should I clean this couch stain or have it cleaned?

March 8, 2020 12:47 PM

Somebody spilled some coffee on my Victorian velvet sofa.

Here is the stain. Here it is within the context of the whole couch. We only discovered this 5 days after the coffee was spilled on it. Should we mess around with it, or get a professional dry cleaner to come, or is it to no avail either way? Blecch, we love this couch.

posted by DMelanogaster to Home & Garden (7 answers total)

That stain isn’t that bad and the sofa isn’t pristine so if it were mine I would rub it with a slightly damp white cloth and see if the stain would sort of feather away. Do not saturate anything though!

If that doesn’t work and the stain is really bugging you, I would have it professionally cleaned, or even recovered.

With old furniture (and carpet) there is often dirt inside the padding or underlayers, which gets “activated” by water and then blooms up into new stains as the wetness from the cleaning evaporates, and the result is an item that looks worse than it did before.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 1:43 PM on March 8, 2020 [6 favorites]

Oh, that’s not too bad at all. You can gently sponge that off with warm water and it should come right out.
posted by Jubey at 3:55 PM on March 8, 2020

Do you have a wetvac? You can sponge it with water and deterg, then clean water, using a wetvac to remove moisture promptly. Then cover with a microfiber towel to absorb any residual dampnmess and avoid a wet ring. Or get a handheld upholstery/rug cleaner, which can be a useful thing to own. It's basically a tiny wetvac.
posted by theora55 at 4:20 PM on March 8, 2020

Tip from a furniture person I know - use distilled water when cleaning. Helps avoid the edge around the area you cleaned, apparently created by some of the minerals in regular water.
posted by belau at 4:43 PM on March 8, 2020 [1 favorite]

What belau said is paramount: don't use anything but distilled water when cleaning upholstery, to avoid a drying ring. Distilled–not bottled drinking water, as that will have trace minerals in it to make it have a more pleasant "taste." This is one of the things you learn in the first week in the furniture biz. I would use distilled water and nothing else, but YMMV.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 5:28 PM on March 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

Another thing that helps avoid drying rings: after blotting up as much of the cleaning water from the upholstery as you possibly can, leave it to dry with a bath towel stretched over the dampened area so that there's good contact between the towel and the underlying upholstery over the entire dampened patch.

Drying rings happen due to minerals in the cleaning water plus whatever other urk it's picked up from the upholstery being carried along to the places where the water is evaporating, then being left behind right where the water molecules finally leave the surface. If they're doing that from the surface of a towel rather than the underlying upholstery, most of the dissolved stuff wicks into the towel along with the water before it evaporates, and it's the towel that gets most of the ring rather than what's underneath it. And towels are easy to wash.

This does make the damp patch take longer to dry because it's got an extra layer of fairly thick cloth to get through, but if you find that you're squeezing pristine distilled water into a layer of padding and what's coming out is discoloured, it will create far less obvious staining.
posted by flabdablet at 3:23 AM on March 9, 2020

https://www.rogerandchris.com/blog/249/how-to-clean-velvet-furniture
posted by tman99 at 10:39 AM on March 9, 2020