How to protect outdoor wood furniture

Placing furniture outdoors can be very exciting. Imagine sitting right at your front porch looking at a spectacular view of the entire neighbor hood, simply a refreshing sight. But unlike the safe environment inside your home, the outdoors can be a pretty harsh place to put furniture, especially if we are talking about the ever changing elements of nature. Wood furniture may have the ambience of a natural element of the environment, but it is still prone to outdoor disasters. If you want to protect outdoor wood furniture, follow these simple steps: You have the traditional cover method, where you’ll cover the furniture with any type of large protective cover when not in use. While this is partially effective in preventing the elements from harming the wood (preventing rain, sleet or snow from landing onto the wood), it does very little to the actual and practical applications of preserving the furniture. Do you seriously want the outside of your home looking like an abandoned home for sale with those covered furniture? But then again, this might be the cheapest method to protect outdoor wood furniture. If you want a better more aesthetically preserving method, you might want to use a special coating that you can apply to the wood. We all know that outdoor wood has been chemically treated to repel harmful insects from chewing off your furniture, but only a few of us actually know that most wood are not treated to withstand water. That is where the special coating comes in. Ask your local hardware store owner about this special coating solution, and directly apply one or two layers of it properly onto the wood. Start from scratch and find the insect repelling solution first if you are using untreated ordinary wood though. A layer of varnish could also do the trick, but you’ll have to withstand the repulsive smell and the asthma-inducing stench for you to apply it to the whole furniture properly. Varnish is actually used in wood to add a smooth finish on its surface, but its use is often limited to small wooden articles and art nouveau. Varnish also magically turns wood into glass (in texture), so it’s not really worth it if you want to truly preserve wooden feel of the furniture. You can also add another coating of special sealants for wood that can protect it from harmful UV rays that can alter its color and appearance. Again contact your local hardware store for these kinds of items. If you need to buy an all in one water/insect/radiation sealant pack, it will cost you more, but at least you won’t have to put multiple coatings in the furniture and risk making it look like a horribly done paint job.