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Keeping furniture in good order in the searing heat encountered on a Spanish finca can be quite straight forward if a few basic principals are followed. For fine furniture there is no real substitute for a good polish with beeswax. Wax from your own bees is great of course, although commercially produced wax is fine too. It doesn't' t matter which brand you use, they all give the wood a high level of protection, however some need more buffing than others. I have been using a very good one, " cera de abejas" by ALP, which I get from Pinturas Andalusia. There is an old saying which goes " one coat of wax and two months with a duster" . So you don't need to polish away every day of the week!
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Another use for wax polish is with old pine kitchen tables (which will be getting a great deal of use and wear in a country kitchen). First paint on two or three coats of high gloss polyurethane varnish. This looks disgusting, a bit like the toffee on a toffee apple! Then, once dry, rub down with fine wire wool and wax in the direction of the grain. This takes off the high gloss and leaves a delicate sheen. The table still retains all the benefits of the varnish (water, stain and scratch resistance), and the finish is very pleasing to the eye.
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Garden furniture (wood not plastic!) only needs a coat of teak oil once or perhaps twice a year. This will keep it in good shape for many years.
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Now I want to talk about bad human habits. How many times have you closed a drawer with your hip because your hands were full? How often have you slammed a cabinet door because you were in a hurry or just angry? And do you tend to lean back in a dining room chair after a really satisfying meal?
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Chairs do seem to be on the receiving end of a lot of our abuse. Most of them are based on the frame chair design. These have a very strong construction of long, straight components. However in some ornamental designs such as the Victorian balloon backed chair, everything has been compromised for the sake of beauty. All parts - the back, legs, & seat - are curved. This makes the chair extremely weak. Invariably they break in the same places, ie. where the back joins the legs. The joints become loose and this makes an ideal egg-laying venue for our dreaded friend - WOOD WORM!
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Chairs should never be lifted by their top rails. Drawers should be pulled by both handles and cupboard doors should be closed - NOT SLAMMED! Above all, mats and coasters should always be used under drinks. In short, for your furniture to give YOU its best, it needs a little Tender Loving Care from you in return!
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The trouble with having fine furniture on the Costa is the heat! All kinds of things happen because of it. The wood dries out; drawers shrink and no longer fit properly and veneers lift. I have had a beautiful mahogany bookcase under a cramp for two weeks because one corner of the top of the base unit had warped. Every couple of days the cramp has been tightened and slowly the top is leveling out again. When it is flat, I will screw a metal plate to the underside (inside and out of sight), which will act as a strengthener. This should ensure that the problem will not reoccur.
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Typically, I worked on a chest of drawers, which had suffered in a similar way. Some of the veneer had lifted; there was woodworm (I shall be dealing with this in more detail in a future article), damage to the drawer runners, loose drawer handles and a piece of moulding missing from the bottom of the frame. The first job was to treat the woodworm. This being done, the next task was to refit the drawer runners so they ran smoothly again. Some weren't' t in bad shape and were easily remedied with a coat of hard bees' wax. Some drawers though, had to have their runners replaced. This was done by plaining down the runners, taking off virtually nothing at the front but taking the back down to almost the level of the drawer bottom. A new piece of wood was then glued into position to replace the back of the runner and planed to fit.
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Then, the drawer handles were taken off and the old glue removed. (They were not replaced until the whole chest had been French polished). There was a curved section of moulding missing so a new one had to be made, glued into the housing and shaped when the glue was properly set. Some damage had occurred to the veneer on the drawer fronts and frame, but these were easily replaced with new veneer. The main veneering problem was on the top of the chest of drawers. Severe damage and blistering to most of the top meant that it had to be replaced, which I did with the use of hot glue and a veneer hammer. In order to keep the newly laid veneer flat, a wooden board was placed on it with heavy weights on top. The chest was now ready for a light stain to blend in the colours and the French Polishing process started again. The handles were then glued into position. All this is good business for me but a lot of expense for you, so please do keep fine furniture out of direct sunlight where at all possible.
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When you are dining at your table, is there something else having a feast as well as you? Since I have been living on the Costa del Sol, I have heard stories of the dreaded `carcoma` (woodworm to you and me). One story went something like this. Two bar owners had separate encounters with a strange noise in their bar which they heard after closing time. One night they heard it together and went on a search for the sour e. To their amazement the noise emanating from one of the chairs. The carcoma had struck again. They promptly binned the chair! This to a furniture restorer like myself seemed to be a rather drastic course of action.
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THE REMEDY: There are treatments available on the market, which work extremely well, such as XYLAMON MATCARCOMA 750. It is a bit fiddly and time-consuming job but well worth the effort. The instructions on the tin must be strictly adhered to. Some treatments come in the form of a spray but I prefer to use a liquid treatment, applying it with a brush and syringe.
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I was working on a 17th Century chest of drawers recently, which, over the last couple of hundred years had obtained character with the help of this little beastie. In order to stop the destruction any further, I injected and brushed almost 2 litres of Xylamon Matcarcoma 750 all over the chest of drawers. It is not necessary to inject every hole because inside there is a maze of tunnels so the treatment may run out some 9 to 10 centimeters distant from where it went in! Any areas without holes must be brushed with the treatment in order for it to soak into the surface. Injected one hole and flushed out several hundred tiny orange eggs - no life of damage and destruction for them.
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When the whole surface had been treated in this way and had dried and soaked well into the wood it was necessary to wash it down with White Spirit in order to neutralise any treatment still left on the surface. Once that was dry, a coat of good creamy beeswax brought the chest of drawers back to a beautiful and useful piece of furniture once again.
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MINOR DAMAGE: If the damage from woodworm is only minor, as in the case of a small veneered occasional table I had to strip and re-polish, it is quite easy going. Following the normal treatment for carcoma I filled the holes with T-KROM wood filler, (this takes the colour when stained and blends in nicely), then the table was French Polished and now has a new lease of life!
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August/September is the time of year when woodworm show and the best time to treat it as the eggs will have been laid by then. If you see a very fine powder under your furniture - it' s time to act!
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