NY Drapery Care and Hand Cleaning Your Floor to Ceiling Sheers
Does your apartment have floor to ceiling windows?
Are they covered in sheers that have not been serviced in years?
As specialty cleaners of fabric window treatments, NY Drapery Care has serviced hundreds of customers living in Manhattan’s glass curtain walled buildings. What we observed is that motorized sheer drapery panels are a very popular choice for covering vast expanses of windows given their functionality, providing privacy while still permitting light in.
Why Do Sheers Need to Be Cleaned Periodically?
What people often don’t realize is that these enormous window sheers act like air filters as they let the air circulate through them embedding soot, dust, dander, and other allergens. This soil buildup is inevitable in the city even if the windows are rarely if ever opened. If you, or anyone else in your home suffer from dust allergies please don’t overlook this important bit of maintenance.
How Often Should You Clean Your Sheers?
While we recommend everyone clean their sheers and drapery every couple of years the reality is that many people who contact us wait until they are painting, renovating, or replacing their windows and must take down their window treatments.
This is often after 5, 10, 15 years or more. If you can imagine what your furniture would look like if you dusted every 10 years you can start to imagine what has collected in the weave of you sheers over time.
Hand-Cleaning Your Fabric Sheers
Ideally, we would clean your sheers by hand in our workroom by washing them using a water-based process and environmentally friendly cleaning solutions.
We use very wide tubs designed specifically for this purpose. The sheers are cleaned and rinsed repeatedly entirely by hand to remove all the embedded soil. Once the sheers are clean, they are hung to naturally dry and then are steamed by hand to remove any wrinkles.
While we wish we could use this immersion process on all fabrics it simply is not safe to use on certain ones without chancing significant shrinkage. Natural fabrics including some linen weaves and wool are extremely susceptible to shrinkage. The only way to ensure that these delicate fabrics will not shrink is by hand dry cleaning them and letting them slowly air dry.
Sheers that have not been maintained in many years can still be safely cleaned, however the fabric may have become permanently discolored. When soot, moisture by the windows and the sun react with each other they will over time permanently discolor the fabric often leaving it with a slight gray cast no matter how clean the fabric is.