Proper care for your patio and outdoor furniture items will keep you from having to make the expenditures to replace them every summer. Regardless of the material that your items are constructed from, some basic care and cleaning will allow you to enjoy your furniture for several years. You can start by cleaning your furniture about once a month. Cleanse the surfaces with a little water and soap, or you may opt to use a pressure washer set on low. Keep in mind that the elements will wear on most materials, so simply washing off the dirt, rainwater and other things that deposit on your furniture will reduce wear.

Remove fabrics and cushions before you start to clean the wood furniture. Spot clean your acrylic items with water and a mild soap as needed. Allow them to dry completely before replacing on the patio furniture to help avoid mold and mildew. When it rains make sure these items have the chance to dry. You may want to flip them so that the back or bottom does not stay wet after rainfall. Machine-wash your fabric items and hang them out to dry. If the fabric goes over a frame, place it on the frame before it is totally dry so that it does not shrink. Items made of wood should be stored inside during the winter and during strong storms. This will keep moisture from seeping into the wood.

If you are unable to store these items inside, either because they are too heavy or for lack of space indoors, you can also protect your wood items by purchasing high quality covers to safeguard them from the elements. Also make sure to cover the entire piece of furniture and place some rubber soles beneath the furniture legs so that they will remain as dry as possible when the ground becomes wet. Do not allow your furniture to be submerged in flood waters.

Flood waters are especially damaging due to the fact that it will be a mix of sewage backup, chemicals from your lawn and other sources and runoff from the street. If you run into a situation where your furniture has been exposed to flood waters, a thorough cleaning with detergent and hot water is in order. Be sure to dry it as well to keep the effects of water to a minimum. When you take care of your lawn and patio furniture correctly, you will not have to suffer the expense of purchasing new outdoor furniture nearly as much. As these things can be quite expensive, depending upon what you buy, take the simple steps to make certain you can enjoy it for many years to come.

It’s amazing what the elements can do to some nice outdoor patio chairs and a picnic table with an umbrella.  Cold air does some serious damage to those “all weather” cushions. Most of them are plastic, which acts almost like a mold attractor, or maybe a moss-algae attractor, in any way, sometime in the Spring, when the snows have thawed (even now when we’re able to essentially count the number of times it actually finally did snow), we constantly find ourselves buying new cushions or a complete new set. It’s amazing how the metal can rust, or bind from corrosion, we had one of these patio umbrellas above one of the tables, that had a crank to open and close it, boy, only after 1 year of keeping this outside, even though it was closed, it literally started snapping its own arms that fold out the umbrella. I think the metal really became weak from the cold and warm temperature fluctuations.

Sometimes it was just rivets that popped off, which made you think, hmm, maybe I can fix that with a bolt or something, but once one goes, they all start to go eventually, it seems like patio furniture, at least the stuff that was on sale, really isn’t made to withstand the weather (at least Massachusetts weather). When we did try and clean some of the “green stuff” off our cushions or umbrella, we used some baking soda-type powder with soap water, a light abrasive like a green scrubby sponge helps, and they looked OK for a little while, but soon it’s hard to hide the fact that they’re old, and when we decided to throw a little party with some coworkers, well we knew it was time to spend the $30 for new cushions.

Too bad a replacement umbrella isn’t as easy to find! So what is a realistic method to add a little life to your deck chairs and table? I guess one thing to do is when the time comes when you’re no longer inclined to sit outside (for the cold), pack the cushions up and put them in the garage, also it’s worth doing that with the umbrella. Anywhere where they won’t get snowed on, will undoubtedly make things easier in the spring. We had no space to park the chairs and table, but in the spring I did decided to take a little sandpaper and sand off some of the rust that was starting to creep on some of the legs, and just give them a little coat of white anti-rust paint. The table with the umbrella had a frosted glass tabletop, which worked ok to push the glass out from the table and lean it up against a wall and give it a nice scrub, before drying it and doing a cleaning with glass cleaner and paper towels.

The trick is to make a little effort to do a good cleaning, and those little places where there’s dirt won’t bother you so much when July 4th comes around. But in the end, buying new garden furniture every few years is just the nature of the situation!