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Doing up old wooden furniture

If you go shopping in a furniture sale these days – what’s the true underlying quality of what you’re buying?

Most pre-made flat-pack furniture is perfectly acceptable f you only want a basic piece to last you a few years before you redecorate and remodel your home. It’s cheap, it’s cheerful, it’s often colourful and the designs are quirky. So there’s really nothing wrong with that approach – as long as you’re happy with it.

If, on the other hand, your soul is telling you to reach for something a little deeper, then it would be wise to follow this “advice”. To many human beings, our home is truly part and parcel of our very being as long as we live – it helps define who we are, we fill it with things we love and only really feel truly contended in and around its space.

Now I would submit that it’s not impossible, but it’s far more difficult, to feel this sense of true ownership and belonging with cheap plastic-coated chipboard moulded into various shapes by machinery than it is with an old piece of solid oak furniture that you’ve done a lot of work on yourself renovating and restoring.

And there’s so much old and beautiful solid wooden furniture available cheaply that if you have the time, it’s definitely worth the renovation effort.

There’s also a whole world of advice out there on how to do it up. But if it’s really tired and old and dirty, simply rub it down with ever finer grained sandpapers, then varnish or wax it (using a colour or clear wax / varnish). You won’t be disappointed in the results.

Concentrate your cheaper spending on things that aren’t really built to last forever. It’s far wiser to update your lounging around furniture in the sofa sales, for example, whilst keeping the quality wooden pieces forever.