Hello.
At this time of year, we all like our garden furniture to look its best.
So in this video, I’ll show you how to clean your teak garden furniture.
Here we have a lovely ‘London’ bench, around about 10 to 15 years old.
I’d say, it hasn’t been cleaned for about 2 or 3 years.
You can tell this by the way dirt has baked hard onto the timbers.
This is exactly what the teak cleaning will remove.
On the front of this rail, you’ll notice it’s very rough, and on the back
it's smooth, which is classic jet wash damage.
What it has done is dug out the grain of the timber, leaving this rough surface.
It can also drive out the natural oils in the timber, which you don’t want to do.
So today, instead of using that jet wash, we’ll use some teak cleaner, a sponge,
a brush, a hosepipe, some protective equipment, and elbow grease – only a little bit, though.
First of all, we’ll use a stiff brush to
remove any moss, lichen or loose dirt.
This red that you can see on the front rail - I’d imagine this has been caused by someone
washing a terracotta patio and the dust splashing up – nothing to worry about –
we'll soon get rid of that with the teak cleaner.
Before we apply the teak cleaner, we need
to soak the bench.
We’re now going to apply the teak cleaner, just using a sponge.
But before we do, make sure you have your rubber gloves and safety glasses.
OK, that’s all the teak cleaner applied.
We need to leave it 4 to 5 minutes before we can start scrubbing.
We’ve left the teak cleaner long enough
to do its work.
We’ll use the green scouring pad to remove the dirt.
All we’ll do now is rinse it off, leave it to dry, and see the results.
That’s all rinsed off.
We’ll leave it to dry, and while we’re doing that, we’ll put the kettle on.
It’s clean.
We’ve worked hard at it, and now we see the results.
All the dirt has been removed, mostly onto my trousers, but then again, I never said
it would be a clean job!
Teak oil - that’s the question people always ask me next, ‘it’s clean, it looks fantastic,
do I apply teak oil to it?’
No!
Why would you want to?
It has got its own natural oil inside, it’s looking after itself, we’ve done our work,
let the bench do its.
The only time I would suggest you use teak oil is if it’s inside, in a conservatory
or orangery; it’s taking in no moisture; it needs to be feed.
But outside, in the garden, leave it alone.
Just sit there and enjoy your garden furniture.