Restoring the Wooden Things in Your Family Home

According to Bayou City Lumber, a supplier of rough cedar, over time, wooden items such as furniture or flooring can often lose their initial luster and beauty. Making sure that your wood items maintain their original beauty involves cleaning and occasional maintenance. By ensuring that your wood items are properly treated, you can help keep the wood in your home in pristine condition, looking as good as the day it was first installed.

The First Step: Removing Dirty Layers

With smaller items such as furniture, taking them apart is a first step to stripping off excess lacquer. Once this is done, it’s fairly easy to clean off the wood with a damp sponge or rag and some soap. After this is done, it’s simply a matter of cleaning, priming, and sealing the pieces.

With floors, this can be somewhat trickier. After sweeping the floor for excess dust and dirt, it’s time to mop the floor with a preferred cleaning agent. After this is done, scrape the top of the floor’s finish using either steel wool or a 120-grit screen. An alternative is to use a pole sander or a floor buffer. By evenly using one of these methods, you should be able to see that the floor is no longer reflective.

Using a cleaning agent at this point will then prepare the floor for either staining or refinishing. It’s up to you whether to go with the more natural look or enhance the color of the floor, but once it is done, it’s time to refinish.

Decks

With decks, most homeowners find that pressure-washing can raise the coating as well as remove unnecessary dirt and grime from the floor to make refinishing it easier. While pressure-washing with water is successful on its own, many use a cleaning solution during this phase to make a consistent finish and ensure that no dirt or other particles are stuck on the deck before staining or refinishing. If a pressure washer is used, it’s absolutely imperative that either a professional handles the task or that the homeowner is aware that overexerting pressure on the deck can cause damage to the wood, including bending of the beams and other problems.

Once the pressure cleaning is done, a simple coat of finish or a weatherproof stain finish can be applied to ensure that the deck remains in top shape for the year to come.

Roofing Issues Every Homeowner Should be Aware of

How Often Should Wooden Items be Treated?

While the answer should be as simple as “when they look like they need it,” regular maintenance is a great way to make sure that your wooden floors, furniture, walls, and decks remain as attractive as possible over the longest period of time. For this reason, the amount of time spent in maintenance should relate to the size of the item: larger items have shorter maintenance periods, and decks should be weatherized at least once a year. Keeping that in mind, your wooden items can stay in an ideal condition for years, as long as they are properly maintained. Just make sure that you always use treatments that match your wooden items, and you will be sure to have functional, beautiful wood items for a long time.