Spring is upon us!

Personally, I can’t get enough snow. I love the way it looks, I love the way it smells, I love the clean, crisp air it brings. Nothing puts me in a finer mood than 12 inches of snow on the ground and more falling from the clouds.

Professionally, I hate the stuff. I’m doing back flips that the warm weather of Spring is here. Since we’re in the teak furniture business, and most of our customers use our furniture outdoors, snow is our professional nemesis. It reduces the amount of furniture we sell and prevents you from cooking, dining, swimming, lounging, gardening, sleeping, and just plain living outside. So I’ll say a quick thank you to Mother Nature for this timely change of seasons, and move right into what you should be doing right about now to prepare your teak patio furniture for your seasonal migration outdoors.

You will still want to clean your teak furniture once a year simply to remove such things a sap, bird residue, pollen, and other natural remnants. Well, fortunately teak is a very low maintenance material that is easy to clean. Simply spray Olympic Deck Wash onto your teak furniture with a garden sprayer, wait five minutes, and then spray it off with a garden hose. Done. Your outdoor furniture will now take on an ivory finish that will weather back to the silver-gray patina in a few months. (For more difficult stains I suggest trying water, Murphy’s Oil Soap, and a soft bristle brush.)

If you use furniture covers, clean them off with soap and water (spraying them down with an everyday garden hose will work just fine). If you put away your covers for the next nine months without having washed them, you may get some unpleasant mildew growth when you pull them back out of the garage next winter.

It bears mentioning that while furniture covers work well in keeping outdoor residue at bay, teak furniture does not need to be protected from such elements as rain, sleet, snow, or heat & humidity. Teak is an incredibly dense-grained wood with a high oil content that helps it repel the weather without any finish or need to cover it or bring it inside for the winter. Just leave your furniture outdoors, and in about a year it will develop silvery gray patina that provides the distinguished, well-known look of finely aged teak. But the truly remarkable characteristics of teak are a subject for another day. I push on.

If you have any of our all-weather cushions or throw pillows, you have several options available to you. If they were under furniture covers then there is nothing to do except sit down. If you left them outdoors with your teak furniture (like I do) then you should give them a good cleaning to remove any dirt that has built up. To clean the fabric, first brush off loose particulate, and then clean briskly with a rag using water and a mild natural soap. Water temperature should be no more than 100° F, as acrylic fiber is sensitive to temperatures at that level. To remove stains that this washing process does not address, use a fabric spot remover. If you have any Arthur Lauer cushions or throw pillows, you can also contact our customer service department for additional recommended cleaning solutions.

However, if you don’t want to leave your cushions and pillows outdoors at all, shelter them in a dry enclosed area or use one of our teak Jefferson Storage Chests, which should keep them relatively dry throughout the seasons.

Lastly, enjoy. You’re done. That’s it. Finito. As I’ve said ad nauseum (at least that’s what my wife tells me), teak furniture is incredibly low maintenance. Especially when you consider the fact that not only is it easy to clean, but you never need to drag it indoors, and it will literally last for decades.

Thanks for tuning in, and I’ll see everyone again on Friday. Oh yes, the answer to last week’s riddle.

Riddle: A boy was born in Boston, Massachusetts to parents who were each born in Boston, Massachusetts. Neither the boy nor his parents have ever left the state, but the boy is not a U.S. citizen. How is this possible?

Answer: The boy was born in 1770 before the Declaration of Independence. Thus there was not yet a United States to be a citizen of.