Outdoor Rocking Chair Care & Maintenance 

After a couple of seasons on the porch, low quality furniture will often rot and break. Buying high quality furniture will ensure many years of use, and is significantly less expensive in the long run. But did you know that even top quality furniture will benefit from a small amount of preventative care? All furniture - even the best - will begin to show signs of age such as color fading, stains, mildew, or rust marks. The care and maintenance tips below will help you ensure that your outdoor rocking chairs and cushions look great for years to come.

Remember that outdoor furniture is not taken care of the same way you are used to cleaning and looking after the furniture inside the house. For example, indoor furniture is often maintained with wax or polishing compounds, while outdoor furniture care tends to benefit from soap, water, and/or stains and protective coatings. Either type of furniture can be harmed by care methods meant for the other type.

Cover Them

Since much of the work you will do to keep outdoor furniture clean is simply removing the natural buildup of dirt, grime, and stains, it should be obvious that the best way to minimize those problems is to cover your furniture! Of course this is not required, but it's worth considering. The cost of covers will pay off in saved cleaning time over the years. If you don't want to invest in covers, you could alternatively consider bringing the furniture to an indoor location during extended times you will not be using the furniture, or during particularly inclement times of year.

You may be surprised how much longer will be your furniture's lifespan if that furniture is not exposed to the elements for those relatively short times of the year when the most dirt and grime accumulate. In some parts of the country, that is during pollen season - on the coast it may be the hurricane season, when furniture is exposed to majority of the annual blowing seabreeze in just a few weeks. And in colder areas, keeping furniture indoors in January and February, when you are unlikely to want to sit outside anyway, will save your furniture from the majority of risk of freezing (which can damage furniture when any moisture inside the wood freezes and expands.

Regular Cleaning

Any furniture benefits from periodic cleaning to remove dirt, grime, and stains and other deposits like pollen, tree sap, or bird droppings. Start by sweeping the furniture with a cloth or broom, and you can usually use a soft to medium bristle brush with a mild solution of soap and water to clean remaining residues.

Deeper Cleaning When Necessary

At times, furniture will take on a stain that cannot be easily removed with soap and water. While you should follow the care instructions for your own furniture, a diluted solution of water and dishwasher detergent, applied with a brush, and followed with a clean rinse, is a good next step.

Restoring Color to Wood Furniture

Wood furniture will often fade slowly over time when exposed to UV rays, even when placed on a covered porch. This is a natural process and does not represent any harm to quality outdoor furniture. However, some people want to maintain the original color of furniture for purely ascetic reasons. In those cases, adding a small amount of bleach to the water and dishwasher detergent solution will lighten and further clean your furniture. The gentle use of a bristle brush to apply the solution is the best way to get a great result. Be sure first to TEST the solution in an out-of-sight place, like under the seat, to test the effect on your particular furniture before doing the entire piece! There are also special cleaning compounds which are particularly effective at this task - again, check with your furniture manufacturer or retailer.

Shield

There are also come compounds that will create a shield, or barrier, between the wood and the outdoor elements. Some outdoor woods, including teak, brazilian cherry, and robinia will benefit - again, only if you want to do this for purely ascetic reasons - if furniture is weatherproof, it does not need to be sealed to go outdoors.

Repainting

Painted furniture will always need to be repainted - eventually. We can put a man on the moon but no paint has yet been invented that doesn't eventually need to be re-applied. Many times furniture will be marketed as "outdoor" when it is not made of weatherproof wood, but instead is inexpensive indoor wood with paint on top. And theoretically, a good paint, if frequently re-applied, can keep an indoor chair performing reasonably well outdoors, but in almost all cases, you will learn that water finds it way into every crack and crevice, and non-weatherproof furniture will soon rot and break - perhaps with you or a loved on sitting in it! So please don't be fooled by marketers of rocking chairs with too-good-to-be-true prices - you can bet those are cheap because they are made of cheap wood.

Back to the point of repainting: even high quality paint will eventually crack, peel or fade, and that that time, you can add another coat of paint, or touch up the paint you have. Matching paint is difficult to impossible, and even if you get the paint from the same place you got the chair, it will usually not match by the time your chair has faded and actually needs repainting. Keep in mind that the most successful repainting strategies are either very small touchups in areas that have obvious scratches, or else compete repaintings when the chair really needs more extensive painting. What typically does not look good is when you try to paint one area on a chair, because the mismatch in color is likely to be noticeable. So it gets back to what we said earlier - don't make the mistake of buying inexpensive furniture that requires constant repainting to keep it from rotting. If you buy truly weatherproof furniture, painting is about ascetics and not about keeping the chair from falling apart, which really takes the stress - and a lot of the painting! - out of the issue of painting.

Mold

Mold is one of many environmental elements affecting outdoor furniture in humid areas of the country. Follow the cleaning instructions above to minimize the issue, but keep in mind that if you brush off mold with a dry towel or brush, you can actually spread the spores in the air and get the problem all over again. So when cleaning for mold, wipe the furniture with a damp cloth. Also, when mold is present, and only if your furniture manufacturer recommends it, you should consider adding bleach to your cleaning compound, as discussed in the "Deeper Cleaning" section above.

What to Avoid

Never use powerful chemicals without first checking your care instructions, and even then, never at full strength. Also avoid all abrasive cleaners, as well as solutions like pine oil. Power washing is generally not recommended, because it will wear down your furniture over time, and will do so faster at high pressure settings. Finally, as noted before - before instituting any cleaning or refinishing procedure, always first test in hidden areas.