Pet Hair vs Pet Stains: What "Pets in Home" Adds

Pet owners get charged for two different things by most cleaners: the hair and the accidents. We charge for one of them. Here's which, and why.

Hair: the "Pets in home" toggle

Pet hair doesn't come out with the cleaning pass — it has to come out before it. Hair that stays in the fabric mats under hot water, clogs the extraction and leaves the piece looking clean-but-fuzzy. So a piece from a home with pets gets a separate hair pass first, and that pass takes time.

In the calculator, tick Pets in home on the piece. The price for that item goes up by a small percentage and the visit is booked a little longer. That's the whole surcharge — it's per piece, it's shown before you book, and you can leave it off for the guest-room chair the cat never sits on.

Stains and smell: included

Pet urine is a stain, and stains are included in every price on the site — we treat every spot as part of the job, never as an add-on. A urine mark on a sofa cushion or a carpet costs exactly what the sofa or the carpet costs.

It is a harder stain than most, because it's three stains in one: the yellow color, which comes out with a peroxide-based product; the organic part, which needs an enzyme cleaner to break it down; and the smell, which needs a dedicated odor remover. Home products usually take the color and the smell and leave the organic part behind — which is why the smell comes back on a humid day. We treat all three.

• Fresh accident: blot, don't rub, and don't put a store-bought cleaner on it — several of them set the stain into the fiber for good.
• Old accident: tell us where it is. Urine that has dried into the backing or the cushion foam is treated differently from a surface mark.
• Smell with no visible mark: still a stain, still included — it's the organic part doing its thing.

What the price looks like

Take a three-seater sofa in a home with a dog. The sofa is one price; Pets in home adds the hair pass; the accident on the middle cushion adds nothing.

• 3-seater sofa (before the pets toggle)$155
• Bedroom carpet (before the pets toggle)$70

Tick the toggle in the calculator to see the exact figure for your piece.

The honest limit

If the urine has been there for years and the dye under it has already lifted, the smell will go and the pale patch may stay — that's the fiber, not dirt, and no chemistry brings dye back. We'll say so when we see it. And if anything isn't right after we leave, tell us within 48 hours and we come back.

Sofa & upholstery cleaning — prices and what's included