We Started as Office Cleaners. Here's How We Became Long Island's Favorite Rug Spa
March 18th, 2026
Patrick Santoro Jr.
Co-Owner of Around The Clock
In 1978, my great-uncle started a company with a mop, a vacuum, and a contract to clean office buildings. For over four decades, Around The Clock was a commercial janitorial operation — the kind of business that kept Long Island’s offices spotless while everyone slept. Three generations of our family have worked in and around that business. We’re proud of what it built. It’s still running today.
But in 2020, something happened that pushed us to build something new alongside it. Something the Long Island market didn’t have. Something we didn’t know yet would become the best decision our family ever made.
43 Years of Building Something. Two Months of Watching It Bleed.
When COVID-19 hit, our commercial janitorial business didn’t slow down — it collapsed. Office buildings went dark overnight. Contracts we’d held for years disappeared. The business our family had spent decades building was in freefall, and there was no traditional way to stop it.
But here’s what we noticed while everyone else was in survival mode: people weren’t going to offices anymore. They were home. And if they were home, they were looking at their floors, their rugs, the things in their houses they’d been meaning to take care of for years.
We weren’t going to sit and wait for the offices to come back. We were going to go into people’s homes instead.
The Gap Nobody Was Filling
Before we committed, we looked hard at the Long Island market. What we found surprised us — and motivated us.
Nobody in our market was actually doing rug cleaning properly.
There were plenty of carpet cleaners advertising rug services. Plenty of guys with truck-mounted steam units who would come to your house, run a wand over your Persian rug, and call it a day. But that’s not rug cleaning. That’s carpet cleaning applied to something that deserves far better.
Real rug cleaning means understanding that a hand-knotted wool rug and a synthetic wall-to-wall carpet are not the same thing. It means knowing how different fibers absorb water, how dyes react under heat, how pet urine crystals embed themselves into a rug’s foundation in a way that surface extraction will never reach. It means having the space, the equipment, and the expertise to do it right — in a facility built specifically for that purpose.
We had something most people entering a new industry don’t have: generations of cleaning knowledge, existing space, and a willingness to invest in doing it right.
We weren’t new to cleaning. We were new to doing it the right way for rugs.
Year Zero: Building the Facility From Scratch
By October 2021, we were operational — and I use that word loosely.
We had a wash floor, a basic centrifuge, drying racks that required manual lifting, and hands-on training we’d sought out ourselves through a private network of rug cleaning professionals. My father and I flew to Florida to learn from people who had been washing rugs for decades. We came back and got to work.
The first customers came from Angie’s List, Thumbtack, and Google Ads. We were picking up rugs, washing them, delivering them back, and then going back at night to edit content for social media — because we knew that if people couldn’t see what we were doing, they’d never know we existed.
Then on Super Bowl Sunday 2022, something unexpected happened. An Instagram post hit 25,000 views in under two hours. I’d never seen anything like it. It told us everything we needed to know about what content could do for a business like ours — and we never looked back.
That year we expanded to TikTok and YouTube, doubled down on video, and started converting our best posts into targeted ads. The demand grew faster than our equipment could handle. My father and I were wearing every hat — pickup drivers, technicians, salespeople, content creators, editors. We upgraded our equipment, expanded our workspace, and reinvested everything we made back into the operation.
Why a Dedicated Facility Changes Everything
When we decided to build a proper rug washing facility rather than offer in-home cleaning, it wasn’t just a business decision. It was a philosophical one.
The only way to truly clean a rug is to take it out of the home, bring it to a controlled environment, and run it through a full process — pre-inspection, dry soil removal, full submersion washing on both sides, centrifuge extraction, and climate-controlled drying. That process cannot happen on your living room floor with a portable machine.
In-home steam cleaning extracts from the top 30% of the rug. A full facility wash removes the grit, bacteria, pet dander, and odor crystals embedded at the base of the fibers — the stuff you can’t see but your rug is carrying every day.
There is a need in the market for proper rug cleaning by technicians who understand the difference between rugs and carpet. That need still exists. It’s the reason we built what we built.
What We Are Today
We are ARCS registered — members of the Association of Rug Care Specialists, an organization that requires you to prove area rug cleaning is your primary business, not a side service. Our technicians hold IICRC certifications in water damage restoration. We operate a dedicated rug washing facility at 52 Sarah Drive in Farmingdale, serving Nassau and Suffolk Counties across all of Long Island.
We’re also in the early stages of founding the Textile Cleaning Research and Education Institute — TCREI — because we believe the rug cleaning industry deserves a proper education and training standard, and we want to help build it.
None of this existed five years ago. All of it came from a decision made in the middle of a pandemic, by a father and son who refused to let 43 years of work become a footnote.
COVID didn’t break our business. It built a better one.
If You've Never Had Your Rug Professionally Washed — This Is for You
If you’ve had a carpet cleaner come to your home and run their machine over your area rug, you haven’t had your rug cleaned. You’ve had your rug’s surface treated.
There is a difference. And once you see what comes out of a rug during a proper wash — the dry soil, the pet dander, the years of embedded grime — you’ll understand why it matters.
We’re in Farmingdale. We serve all of Long Island. We offer free pickup and delivery, and a 20% discount if you drop your rug off yourself.
If you want it done right, you know where to find us.
52 Sarah Dr, Farmingdale, NY
atcrugwashing.com
(516) 523-6824
