Furniture Freshen Up

When was the last time you cleaned your couch? How about your chairs, or your mattress? If the answer is, “a while ago”, we don’t blame you. There are so many steps in a full-house clean that things can easily slip through the cracks. You’re more likely to remember to vacuum the floors and wipe down the benches than to deep clean furniture that might not even seem that dirty at first glance.

But the truth is, upholstery gets just as dirty as carpets and should ideally be cleaned just as often. Your couch, for example, sits gathering dust, pet hair and all the little things humans shed that we’d rather not think about. Running the vacuum over the cushions as an afterthought combats this build-up of mess to an extent, but a lack of TLC over time results in tired, grubby looking furniture.

To help you keep your furniture looking as fresh and clean as the day you bought it, here are some of our top upholstery cleaning tips. We’ll focus on the two major types of mess that can sully your sparkling clean furniture: dry mess like dust or pet hair, and wet mess like spills or stains.

Dusty buildings or homes with pets tend to need cleaning more often, as those pesky little hairs and dust bunnies seem to settle over everything in sight. Carpet and rug fibres can trap these bits of debris right down to their roots, leaving you with dirty, hard-to-clean floors that set off allergies. The same thing can happen to your furniture as a layer of hair and dust builds up.

The easy answer to this problem is to regularly vacuum your upholstery. The more accurate answer is to vacuum your upholstery with a motorised power head. A standard vacuum head with run-of-the-mill suction only cleans the surface of carpet or upholstery fibres, leaving behind all the dust and dirt that’s embedded further down. A motorised power head, however, is designed to clean right down to the base of the fibres and lift that hard-to-reach mess.

Rather than trying to awkwardly manoeuvre a floor head across your couch cushions, take advantage of your vacuum’s included accessories. An upholstery tool and crevice tool will come in handy for surface cleaning and getting into gaps between cushions, but the winning combination for effectively vacuuming your furniture is a stick vacuum that converts to a hand vacuum and a mini motorised brush.

Take the Wertheim Evolution Stick Vacuum, for example. Like most of the stick vacuum cleaners at Godfreys, it easily converts to a handheld cleaner to clean surfaces other than your floors. It also comes with one of the most efficient mini power heads we’ve ever seen, particularly when it comes to picking up pet hair. By combining the Evolution’s handheld vacuum and mini motorised pet brush, you can easily run the cleaner over any piece of furniture and remove embedded dust and hair.

The Vorwerk Kobold VK200 Upright Vacuum Cleaner can also be paired with the PB440 Electric Upholstery Brush (sold separately) to effectively remove pet hair, crumbs, lint and deeply embedded dirt from furniture. Its counter-rotating brushes vibrate the dirt out of fibres so it can be easily sucked up by the vacuum.

Other stick vacuums like the Hoover Zenith and all Tineco models – including the PURE ONE X, PURE ONE S11 and PURE ONE S12 Platinum – feature a similar mini power brush and handheld capabilities that will get the job done with little to no effort. 

Dust and hair aren’t the only kinds of mess that your home will attract, and many of us are guilty of spilling or dropping things on our furniture. Stains are a sure-fire way to make upholstery look worn, which isn’t helped by how hard they can be to get out.

There are two different routes you can take when it comes to deep cleaning stained or marked furniture, and it all depends on what that furniture is made out of. Before you clean your couch or armchair, look at what kind of material it’s made from and whether it’s okay for that material to get wet.

For waterproof fabrics, your best bet is a carpet shampooer. They’re designed to soak and scrub carpet in the same way that you’d wash your hair, and can be used just as easily on surfaces like upholstery.

The Hoover SMARTWASH+ Automatic Carpet Washer (AU only) is a great machine for this job, as it has a hose and brush tool that makes it easy to wash spots the cleaner itself can’t reach. Using this tool and the right carpet shampoo solution, you can scrub furniture to remove even stubborn stains and completely refresh your upholstery.

To ensure a really good clean, it’s recommended that you rinse out your carpet shampooer after use, refill it just with water and go back over the surface to remove any traces of solution. This will stop extra dust from getting stuck to solution-soaked fibres in the future.

For smaller jobs or routine spot cleaning, the Bissell Little Green® Portable Spot & Stain Carpet Cleaner is a great option. Its small size, flexible hose and tough brush make it perfect for targeted stain removal when a full-sized machine isn’t necessary.

Many textiles used to make furniture will be damaged by direct contact with water. A leather couch, for example, couldn’t handle being soaked, shampooed and rinsed. In this case, your best bet is a steam cleaner.

Steam mops and cleaners break down dirt and stains using steam instead of a direct stream of water, eliminating harmful germs and bacteria without the use of chemicals. This not only removes any marks or dirt from your furniture, but gets rid of unpleasant odours too.

If you’ll only be using your steam cleaner for furniture, countertops and appliances, opt for a handheld model like the Wertheim Pro Multi Steamer. It heats up quickly, effectively blasts away dirt, grease or mould, and comes with a range of accessories to clean different surfaces around your home.

For a more versatile steamer that will clean your floors as well, go for the Hoover Dual Steam Plus Steam Mop. It easily switches between an upright steam mop and a handheld steam cleaner depending on your needs, and has separate water and detergent tanks to offer different ways of cleaning. It also includes 14 specialised accessories to get into a variety of tricky spots.