Wood Care – Things to be learnt!Posted Apr-22-08 22:51:37 PDT Furniture does contribute substantially to the overall home décor. When it comes to the wood furniture, a kind of ethnicity and tradition gets attached with it. Though molded plastic furniture, steel furniture and furniture made of other materials are quite popular, yet wooden furniture have retained its specialty and popularity still among furniture lovers and interior designers. Let’s learn some important wood care tricks that would help us in protecting our wooden furniture and other things that are made of wood. Some Facts about Wood: There are some amazing facts about wood. A freshly sawn wood contains 50% of water of its total weight. There is evidence that wood has been used for furniture and for other decorum purposes since the development of non-nomadic cultures. “Evidence of furniture from antiquity survives in the form of paintings, such as the wall Murals discovered at Pompeii; sculpture, and examples have been excavated in Egypt and found in tombs in Ghiordes, in modern day Turkey.” [Courtesy: Wikipedia.org] With the evolution of furniture, the usage has been widened and wood care has been advanced, too. There have been thousands of wood care tricks practiced all around the world, controversies still prevail how to restore and what procedures are essential under what conditions. A piece of wood is completely different from another piece of wood. Wood has several specialty as every species of wood a hardness or softness, a specific gravity, a porosity, a density, a color range, a unique grain, a thermal dynamic, a moisture content, tannins, lignin, resins, oils, sap, pitch, and characteristics that indicate its age, decomposition rate, shrinking rate, warping, cupping, cracking, weathering, and so on. Such complexities make wood care a real difficult task. Your wood care strategy should be different according to the types of woods as well as the structures, furniture and tools. Your ignorance or carelessness can damage the wood. The longevity of your wooden materials depends on all the above factors. Either you repair, replace or apply protective paint on your wood materials; you should ask the following questions:
[Courtesy: SeeDirtRun.com] The wood that is supposed to be exposed to weather should be taken care of differently than the wooden furniture for interior purposes. Cabins are made of woods and they are supposed to be exposed to extreme weather conditions. Here you need to take special care of your cabin wood. Restoring cabin sidings is one of the most difficult to part of wood care. People tend to use wire brushes and pressure washer to clean the stains and fungus from the cabin sidings. But this can seriously damage the wood itself. You should be using detergent that is specially made for cleaning exterior wood. These wood cleaners can be obtained from home and garden centers in the paint sections. You can use sanders, but don’t rub so hardly that scars would come out. Gentle scrubbing can work to remove stains and fungus. To maintain the moisture of the wood, you can use linseed oil as primer. Then after four or five days, you can apply high quality acrylic finish; that’s the best option to improve the longevity of the wood. You can take the help of any certified wood care consultant. It ensures both your wood property and well as the value for money. |