Before & After Gallery

How to read a carpet cleaning before-and-after

Before-and-after photos are the easiest thing in this trade to fake, so it is worth knowing what an honest one looks like. Three things give a staged shot away.

The lighting changes. If the "before" is shot in shadow and the "after" under a window or a flash, you are looking at exposure, not cleaning. A real pair is shot from the same spot in the same light, usually minutes apart.

The angle changes. Carpet pile looks dramatically different depending on which way it is lying and which direction you photograph it from. Shoot the "before" against the nap and the "after" with it and you can produce a transformation without cleaning anything.

Only the wet half is shown. Freshly extracted carpet is darker and richer while it is damp, and some of that goes away as it dries. A shot taken with the wand still in frame is showing you water as much as results.

Ours are taken from one position, in the available light, with half the area done and half not — which is the least flattering way to do it and the only one that actually shows you anything.

Why there are not hundreds of photos here

Because we ask permission, every time, and most people say no — which is entirely reasonable when the photograph is of their living room floor. We would rather publish a small number of jobs we genuinely did, with the customer's agreement, than fill a page with stock images bought from a photo library and captioned as Glasgow work. If you have ever searched for a local trade and seen the same "before and after" photo on four different companies' websites, you already know how common that is.

So this page grows slowly. If you book a clean and are happy for us to photograph it, say so on the day and it may well end up here.

What a realistic result looks like

Honest expectation-setting matters more than photographs. On a carpet that is dirty — soil loading, traffic lanes, general greying — the change is usually dramatic, and that is most of what we clean. On a carpet that is worn — pile physically abraded and flattened by years of grit — the change is real but much more modest, because the problem was never dirt. And on damage, a burn, a bleach mark, a tear or sun fading, there is no change at all, because cleaning does not restore colour that has gone.

We will tell you which of the three you have when we look at it, before you commit to anything. That conversation is worth more to you than any gallery, and it is why we would rather you phoned and described the problem than scrolled through pictures of somebody else's hallway.