Easily maintain your blinds with these three simple tips

Your brand new blinds look fantastic, and you’ve put so much time into choosing the right fabric, but it’s also important to know how to maintain your blinds! No matter how high quality the fabric is, they will get a little dusty and dirty a few months down the track, seemingly losing their once sparkling lustre, so knowing what to do to keep them looking as good as new is essential.

In this article, we’ll be providing three general cleaning and maintenance tips for blinds of all types. We’ve split it into three categories; spot removal, dusting, and vacuuming, and have gone through in detail how to use all three of these to get your blinds back to looking as good as new. Got any questions? Feel free to send us a comment, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Removing spots from blinds

First off, let’s have a look at the common misconceptions arising from removing stains or spots
from blind fabrics, which generally include:

• You have to spray the spot directly.
• You must use a carpet stain cleaning product.
• You must dab the stain with a cotton bud that has been immersed in the spot removal product.

The first two are wrong, and the third one has some truth to it. Here’s why…

Spraying the spot directly, in a similar way to cotton based clothing, can often leave a bigger stain on the blind, depending on which type of fabric is used. Whilst the actual, offending spot may be gone completely, directly spraying onto the blind can leave an effect similar to a grease mark. This, however, can be easily avoided by spraying the cleaning product onto a clean, dry cloth, and gently wiping the area until it is gone. You do not need to use a cotton bud!

The cleaning product, addressing the second point, doesn’t have to be anything specific. Many all purpose cleaning sprays that you can find at hardware stores will do the job perfectly, as long as they aren’t intended for use on metals. Many carpet stain removal substances can also work, but check on what is inside it first, as these can include chemicals intended for combating mould and mildew.

Dusting your blinds

As blinds are essentially defying gravity in their everyday use, for a more scientific take on things, greater care is required when dusting them. If you dust them incorrectly, or put unnecessary pressure on the fabric, they can lose their tautness, and appear saggy afterwards, for which the only remedy is to purchase new fabric. Always brush downwards, and start from the top, this will also make sure that vinyl fabric blinds will avoid creasing and brush marks.

For delicate fabrics, such as vinyl blinds or fine mesh fabrics, it is advisable to use a soft fibre brush, such as lambs wool or something similar. Hard fibre plastic brushes can pull at the fabric fibre, and if you brush too hard, they can rip these out our scuff large parts of the fabric itself. If your blinds have slats, venetian blinds, always dust sideways across the slats, as going downwards can bend the slat and/or damage the pulley mechanism that holds them together.

Vacuuming

Vacuuming your blinds is often frowned upon as a shortcut that can potentially damage the blind. However, there is a method for safe vacuuming that will make sure that the fabric stays taut and free from damage. This can be done by moving the brush head downwards from the top of the blind, in a similar way to the dusting method that we listed above. For slatted blinds, again like before, vacuum across the slat to avoid tearing or bending.

However, when vacuuming you must have the detail brush head attached. General carpet heads can often be hard to control, and will take more time to thoroughly clean the blind. Using no brush head opens up the prospect of tearing and damaging the fabric, and can even imprint holes into the blind fabric if the vacuum is set to a high power. If you don’t have a fine detail brush for your vacuum, they can normally be picked up for a low price at a hardware store.

Get in touch!

Call the team at Awesome Blinds today on 1300 550 552 to see how we can install easy to clean blinds in Melbourne, at low prices.