Minimising Repair Bills for Your Outdoor Furniture

If you have furniture in your back yard, be it a single lawn chair or a full dining set, you’ll understand what it’s like to have your possessions exposed to the elements. Pretty much everything else we own – especially expensive stuff like Palliser recliners – is looked after in a warm, dry environment.

Well, outdoor furniture needs a bit of nurture as well. A garden table will tend to be more rugged and robust than its indoor counterpart, but that doesn’t mean you can just put it outside and forget about it for years on end. You have to make a bit of effort to keep it in a good condition in order to avoid any nasty surprises at the start of the barbecue season, and it’s best to know about the maintenance aspect of garden furniture before you actually make a purchase.

So without further ado, these are the main three ways to minimise damage to garden furniture and ensure your repair and preservation bills are as low as they can be.

Pick a Suitable Amount Of Garden Furniture

This is the best way of reducing repair and maintenance bills. Obviously, a large tables and chairs set involving a parasol and ten seats will absorb more of your money over the years than a smaller set. It’s nice to have a huge amount of furniture for those hot summer days, but do you really need that many seats permanently? How often are you really going to use them? You’re going to be spending money on varnish (see below for more details) and generally throwing your hard-earned cash at each one of the chairs you buy.

Consider buying a smaller set, committing some of your indoor or conservatory furniture to outdoor service in warmer months, or even renting extra chairs when you’re entertaining large numbers of people. That way, you curtail the actual area of wood which will become a liability over winter months. If there are just two of you, a simple bistro set (two chairs and a table, ubiquitous in Northern European cafés and bistros) will suffice. Generally they’re made of wrought iron or similar, so they’re less prone to structural deterioration but will rust without paint..

Put Your Garden Furniture into Hibernation over the Winter Months

It’s outdoor furniture, sure. But there’s a long gap between the last barbecue of autumn and the first barbecue of spring. Winter brings the harshest weather – cold, wet and windy weather – which causes patio furniture to crumble rapidly and might make it unfit for use the following party season.

One way of avoiding this is to put it indoors for the worst of the weather. Most patio furniture is foldable so you can stow it into the corner of a garage or outbuilding. Heaving it up into the attic is not recommended, but if you don’t have an outbuilding or shed then carefully protecting it with tarpaulin will do to keep the worst of the weather off. Some garden stores sell small, cupboard-like sheds which work well as garden furniture storage and will generally fit into even a small garden unnoticed.

It is especially important to keep parasols protected during winter. Apart from the obvious risk of wind and rain damage to fabric left outside, the cosy folds of a dormant parasol are often very tempting to small critters in search of a winter home.

A Protective Layer for Your Garden Furniture

Nearly all garden furniture will require a coat of paint or varnish. Wood isn’t suitable for being left outside on its own – it’ll blemish, warp, crumble and eventually rot away. Metal isn’t much better. With the exception of some, not-particularly-nice-looking metals, metal furniture will need a lick of paint every year or two to prevent rust and keep it looking nice. Peeling paint on a wrought iron table is unsightly, irritating and sharp – a big no-no if children are likely to be using the furniture.

When painting or repainting garden furniture, it’s important to thoroughly remove the existing layer of paint. Do this carefully in a well-ventilated area. Remember – older patio furniture may be coated in toxic lead paint. This is highly poisonous and should be tackled outdoors with a face mask, away from children who are more susceptible to lead poisoning. If you think that your patio furniture hasn’t been painted for years, it’s worth taking the paint off just in case it contains lead and replacing it with new, lead-free paint.