Furniture care tips

Have you ever bought handmade, solid oak furniture? Then you should really know how to care for it properly. Besides handling it with care when moving it, here are a few tips to help care for such furniture.

Solid wood furniture needs to be waxed regularly with natural beeswax. The traditional thick ‘paste’, lightly applied with a soft rag, is best, but a natural spray-on is also good. Silicon spray is not suitable as it does not feed or nourish the wood, but merely puts a slippery, shiny surface it.


Timber should be dried as close as possible to the moisture content of the room that it is going into. This will minimise movement in the timber. Cells will expand or shrink across their girth as they take on or lose moisture until they balance with their surroundings, and reach ambience (this is why doors stick in the winter).

If the room is very damp, then the wood will swell, ‘blowing’ joints apart, while if the moisture is too low, the wood can shrink causing tension in the timber and possibly splitting.

Hot coffee cups, red wine glass rings and watermarks from vases which mark polished surfaces are normally repairable, but cigarette burns and sharp edges can sometimes cause irreparable damage. Highly-skilled furniture polishers can remove small marks and scratches, wine rings and water marks, and it is better to find a professional rather than attempting to remove the mark yourself and then ending up with a much bigger problem. You should ask your furniture maker how long-lasting the surface finish he uses is, or what he would recommend to increase the durability. Although not as durable, there has been a recent trend of going back to the natural finishes, such as oils and waxes, rather than using the manmade lacquers, which tend to be sprayed on.

Furniture should be kept away from direct sunlight, as it will cause the wood to fade or even shrink. A table left in direct sunlight with a fruit bowl in the centre for some time will end up with a darker area under the fruit bowl.

If a sideboard is put in front of a window, then it’s worth drawing the curtains or blinds during the brightest part of the day.

Inevitably, furniture will age, taking the odd knock and dent as it becomes an antique, gaining patina from a build-up of wax polish mixed with dust, creating darker areas in the corners and lighter areas in the high spots.

You should also be aware that over time, light woods will darken, and dark timbers will lighten.

Taken from www.euroweeklynews.com/news/