Short-Let Damage Reports: What a Photo Inspection Should Cover After Every Guest
Written by Iva, founder of Iva Cleaning Services London. Damage in a short let is rarely dramatic. It is a…
The sofa is the most-used, least-cleaned piece of furniture in a London flat. It gets sat on for four hours a day, eaten on, slept on by the dog and occasionally by a guest, and cleaned about once, usually after something has been spilt on it. The good news is that most fabric sofas clean up well. The bad news is that the wrong method shrinks, bleeds, water-marks or sets a stain permanently, and the only warning is a small label under a cushion that almost nobody reads.
This guide starts with that label, because it decides everything else. Then: routine care, how to treat a spill, how to clean the whole sofa yourself, and the point at which the label is telling you to call someone. We clean sofas every week as part of upholstery cleaning in London, and the method we use is chosen from the same code.
Look under the seat cushions or on the underside of the frame for a small tag with one or two letters. It is the manufacturer’s instruction for what the fabric tolerates.
| Code | Meaning | What you can use |
|---|---|---|
| W | Water-based cleaning | Water, mild upholstery shampoo, hot-water extraction. The easiest fabric to clean. |
| S | Solvent only | Dry-cleaning solvent. No water at all; water leaves rings or shrinks the fabric. Common on velvet, some linens and rayon blends. |
| WS or SW | Water or solvent | Either, with care. Test first. |
| X | Vacuum only | No liquid of any kind. Brush and vacuum. A professional may be able to do more; you should not try. |
No label? Treat the fabric as S until a test patch proves otherwise. A test patch means a few drops of your intended cleaner on a hidden area (the back, under a cushion, the fabric under the frame), left to dry completely, then checked for colour change, water marks or texture change. Ten minutes of patience saves a sofa.
Blot, never rub. Press a clean white cloth or kitchen roll onto the spill and lift the liquid out; rubbing spreads it and pushes it into the padding. Work from the outside of the spill inwards. Then, by fabric code:
W and WS fabrics: a teaspoon of clear washing-up liquid in half a litre of cool water, applied to a cloth (not poured on the sofa), dabbed on the stain, then blotted with a clean damp cloth to rinse and a dry one to lift the moisture. Repeat rather than soak. For greasy marks, a little bicarbonate of soda sprinkled on first and left for 15 minutes absorbs the oil before you dab.
S fabrics: an upholstery dry-cleaning solvent on a cloth, dabbed, in a ventilated room, after a test patch. No water.
Specific stains: red wine on a W fabric comes out with cold water and washing-up liquid if it is fresh; salt does nothing useful. Coffee and tea the same, with a drop of white vinegar in the rinse water. Ink and dye are solvent jobs. Pet accidents need an enzyme cleaner, because ordinary detergents remove the mark and leave the smell, which brings the pet back to the same spot. Blood is cold water only; hot water sets it.
Whatever you use, dry the area quickly: a fan or a hairdryer on cool. Slow drying is what leaves the ring.
For a W or WS sofa that needs a full refresh, you have two realistic options.
Hot-water extraction (often called steam cleaning, although the water is hot rather than steam). A machine sprays a cleaning solution into the fabric and immediately vacuums it back out with the dirt. Hire machines are available from hardware shops; professional machines are far more powerful and, crucially, recover more of the water, so the sofa dries in hours rather than days. The risk with hire machines is over-wetting: the padding gets soaked, takes two days to dry, and smells of damp. Use the minimum water, go over each area with the vacuum only afterwards, and keep the room warm and ventilated. Our post on why we use steam cleaning explains what the professional version does differently.
Dry foam or dry-compound cleaning uses very little moisture and is the safer route for fabrics that tolerate water but not much of it, and for S-code fabrics in professional hands. It cleans the surface well and the deep fibres less well.
Whichever method, the order is: vacuum thoroughly, pre-treat any stains, clean the whole surface including the back and the sides so the colour stays even, dry fast. Cleaning only the seat cushions leaves them a shade lighter than the arms, which looks worse than the dirt did.
A full hot-water extraction of a three-seater sofa takes a professional about 45 minutes and a hire machine about twice that, most of it on the extra dry passes. Drying is the number that matters for a London flat in winter: a professional machine leaves the fabric damp to the touch and dry in three to five hours with the heating on and a window cracked; a hire machine that has over-wetted the padding can take two days, and the sofa smells of wet dog until it is done. If you are cleaning in a flat with no through-draught, do it in the morning, not the evening, and keep the cushions standing on their edges so both sides dry.
A professional upholstery clean of a two-seater fabric sofa is £54 plus VAT; a three-seater is £81, a four-seater £108 and a corner sofa £135, with an armchair at £28. Carpet, upholstery and mattress visits have a £98 plus VAT minimum, so a sofa is usually cleaned on the same visit as a carpet or a mattress; the mattress side is covered in how to clean a mattress. Our cleaner reads the label, tests a patch, chooses extraction or a low-moisture method accordingly, and leaves the sofa dry enough to sit on within a few hours.
Pet hair is not dirt but it stops every cleaning method working, because it mats under water. Remove it first with a rubber glove dragged across the fabric, a lint roller, or the vacuum’s turbo tool. The full routine is in how to remove pet hair from furniture and carpets.
Sofa past a sponge and a hope? Book online, choose the pieces you want cleaned, and we confirm within one working hour.
