Dining room furniture care tips

After you’ve purchased your handmade dining table and chairs, you’ll want to keep them well polished. Natural products like beeswax and oils are back in fashion. They are environmentally friendly, but are generally not as durable as modern solvent-based products. Polish manufacturers are constantly developing products based on water and oil-wax mixtures that are more resistant to heat and humidity, while having little impact on our environment.

For the care of your dining room furniture, avoid silicone-based products. Natural beeswax polish is good to use. Natural wax can come in the form of a spray or a thicker paste from a can. Thicker paste can be applied with a rag or stiff brush, a shoe brush is good especially for carving. This can be polished with a soft cloth, the towel is ideal.

A paste of beeswax can be easily made using 1 pound of yellow beeswax and a half pint of good quality turpentine or white spirit. By adding a tablespoon of gasoline, you will speed up the drying of the wax, since it helps the evaporation of the turpentine. Beeswax can be purchased from a local beekeeper, so keep an eye out for honey for sale. The wax can be crushed with a knife or broken into pieces with a hammer. It’s easier if you first wrap the wax in a cloth. The wax can then be melted in a pan, within a pan, just like melting chocolate, but be careful, you’re using a flammable liquid near a heat source. I find the easy way to make the paste is to put the broken pieces of wax in a can, add the turpentine, cover and let sit for a day or two, stirring occasionally.

Try to avoid putting your dining table in direct sunlight. It will cause the wood to fade or even shrink. A fruit bowl left in the center for some time will end up with a darker area underneath. If the furniture is placed in front of a window, it is worth closing the curtain or the blind when direct sunlight hits the furniture.

Hot cup rings, red wine and water marks can often be removed with a professional polish, but be careful when trying to remove the mark yourself; you could end up with a bigger problem than the one you started with.

Gradually, your furniture will age, getting occasional bumps and dents as it gets older, gaining patina due to a buildup of wax mixed with dust, creating darker areas in the corners and lighter areas at high points. It’s worth knowing that over time, light woods darken and dark woods lighten, so your natural oak dining table will darken to a Tudor oak color, and your dark brown walnut dining table will gradually darken. it will turn honey-colored.