Is there any way to clean upholstery other than having a professional come ...

[brigmaman]

My grandmother has had a storage unit for about 6 months and is now cleaning it out. We took 2 upholstered chairs, but they have some mildew (so much for $180/month and supposed "climate-control!") Is there anything I can use to clean them?

[Dcclerk]

I took a pretty hard-core reupholstery class way back when. (It was vocational so 7 hours a day for a couple of months.) We never cleaned the upholstery because we were always changing it, but one thing we did a lot was put things out in the sun to get some nasty smells to go away. I know that in most of the country, you don't see that right now, but I would consider sunning your chair for a while. Probably you would need to use some sort of spot remover on any patches first. But to get the smell out, the sun works wonders.