What is the best furniture polish to use?
It's an excellent question and we're going to talk about that today.
Hi there. I'm Angela Brown and this is Ask a House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question,
and I get to help you find an answer.
Now today's show is brought to us by MyCleaningConnection.com
which has a whole list of furniture polishes
that you can decide which one is right for you based on the type of wood and the type
of furniture that you have.
All right, MyCleaningConnection.com
It's a hub for all things cleaning.
Okay, on to today's show which comes from a house cleaner who want to know what is the
best kind of furniture polish they should be using for their business.
Now I should preface this question by saying that I belong to a private Facebook group
that has over 6,700 professional house cleaners in it.
So we have a lot of conversations about things like this, and so this opinion is not only
my own but it's based on a wide variety of house cleaners who are inside customers' homes
and they get to clean a variety of different pieces of furniture.
We talk about different products and what works and what leaves waxy build-up and what
shows fingerprints and all these things.
Okay, so this is a compilation of all of the things that we've discussed, and the common
beliefs and the practices around furniture polish.
First, I'd like to give you my personal opinion, and my personal opinion is that I'm not a
fan of furniture polish.
The reason I'm not is for all the reasons I'm about to explain to you right now.
Now, when you have wood furniture
and furniture polish is typically used for wood furniture,
when you have wood furniture you have to first
look at the type of wood furniture that you have.
Is it real wood or is it a wood veneer?
Now, if you're not sure, it's going to come down to price.
If you paid under a couple hundred dollars or a couple hundred pounds, it's probably
a fake wood or a plywood that has a veneer cover over it.
And if you paid a couple of thousand dollars for it, it's probably real wood.
The difference is the real wood is going to use a different type of furniture polish than
the veneer type products.
Now the veneer type products are already pre-treated.
That's the good news.
Yay.
Okay, so what happens is when you get dust on your furniture, a lot of that can just
be dusted with a clean microfiber cloth.
So you don't need any chemicals whatever.
And if you use chemicals, it could actually harm the pre-treated veneer on, I don't want
to call it fake wood because it's a real wood cover that goes over the top of it, but it
could ruin that pre-treated veneer.
There are a couple of different things that you have to look at when you're talking about
furniture polish, and one of the things that you're looking at is
what are you trying to do?
Are you trying to cover up scratches?
Maybe some dings, maybe some water marks or heat marks where you had something like an
alarm clock or a computer that had a big fan on it that was sitting on that desk, for example.
Are you trying to cover something up, or are you just trying to dust it?
Because if you're just trying to dust it, like I say, a damp microfiber cloth does a
perfect job.
So you don't need any chemicals at all.
Now, if you have, let's say, kitchen cupboards and they have a little bit of sticky stuff
on them and you wiped it away and now it's not as shiny in some places, you can use a
furniture polish that's made of oil.
Now, furniture polishes are made of different things.
They're not created equal.
There are furniture polishes that are made of wax.
It's a waxy paste and it's usually some sort of a beeswax or a carnauba paste.
Now, along with those pastes you will also find many of them have a petroleum base which
is like Vaseline and that helps when you spread it on the wood that it goes on smoothly and
it fills in the cracks and the gaps.
So this is awesome.
You would use a paste for something that is like an antique piece of furniture where the
wood has lost its finish and you need to cover in the grooves and fill in those gaps.
It will make a smoother finish and will also leave a shine.
Now the problem with having some kind of an oil or a waxy paste that you're using as furniture
polish is it acts like a magnet for dust.
So it looks really nice for a little bit, and then it leaves a film of dust where the
dust settles.
So, yeah, if you're going to use it, you have to stay right on top of it and you have to
constantly be using the furniture polish and constantly dusting.
Okay, so there are other types of furniture polish and one of them is aerosol.
Now you'll see a lot of aerosol products on the market which are designed for the home
owner, not professionals, because it's super easy to use.
People just spray it on their furniture and then they wipe it and it looks nice.
Yay.
Okay, the problem is a lot of the aerosols have wax in them, and so when you spray that
on there, it leaves a waxy build-up on your furniture.
It looks really nice for a few minutes.
Then you leave, and as it starts to fade off, there are spots and splotches, and when you
touch your furniture, it leaves fingerprints.
So now you got to go out and you got to buy more furniture polish
and you've got to do it again.
And so there are people that are addicted to furniture polish just to feed that need.
What happens is you can strip the furniture and you can remove all that waxy build-up,
and there are furniture polishes, and I will leave links in the show notes, that will strip
that waxy build-up.
Here's the catch.
When you strip the waxy build-up, a lot of times you will also strip the fine finish
or the veneer that is also on the furniture.
That's because this stripping furniture polish is made of turpentine and mineral spirits,
and so it is designed to cut the gunk and take this stuff off, but at the same time
it takes off that nice veneer finish that is designed already on the wood.
So if you're buying a brand new piece of wood furniture or a table of something like that,
you may not have to use any furniture polish at all.
We're talking about furniture that you already have that's already been treated and you've
already been stuff on it.
But if you're buying a brand spanking new piece of furniture, you may not need to use
any furniture polish at all.
Okay, so the next thing that we have to take into consideration is that all furniture is
not created equal.
You might have some furniture that has wood in it, but it might also have steel legs,
or it make have a glass tabletop, or it might have a leather back to it.
So you can't use furniture polish on all those other substances
because every substance has its own special cleaning solution or supply or
detergent that is going to help clean that particular thing.
If it has a leather back, you need a leather cleaner for the back.
You can't use furniture polish on that.
If you have stainless steel legs and you use furniture polish, it's going to leave a real
waxy build-up that's going to be tough to clean off, and it's just going to smear.
If you use it on glass, again it's going to smear and it won't have the clear look that glass has.
You have to use different cleaning chemicals for different things, which is one of the
reasons I go back to as a professional, it's super easy to grab your wet microfiber cloth,
dust everything up, polish it and you're done, and not use the furniture polish, okay?
Just a clean microfiber cloth.
You can use that on glass.
You can use that on leather.
You can use that on stainless steel, and you can use that on wood.
It makes a really nice easy dusting project, boom, we're done
and you're on to the next thing.
Now if you're a homeowner and you want to experiment, I know lots of people love to
use furniture polishes that have a scent to them.
It smells like orange and citrus or lemon.
Okay, the truth of the matter is that clean does not have a smell,
and so your furniture does not need to smell.
If you're putting stuff on your furniture just because it smells nice, you may want
to rethink that.
There are other things like essential oils that you can diffuse in your house that will
give your house a nice smell without you actually putting stuff on your furniture that's going
to build up just because it smells nice.
There are a couple of different things to know about furniture polish if you're going
to use furniture polish.
There are a couple of things that I might recommend.
Number one, dust first.
Always dust first before you put anything on the surface or the furniture itself.
Don't be using it as a cleaning solution.
Dust first, and then if you have to put some solution, do that after.
When you use a furniture polish, find a piece of wood that is inconspicuous.
Like if it's your kitchen cabinets, do it on the inside of your kitchen cabinet and
see how that reacts and how it responds, and maybe try it for a week or two.
See what it looks like after a week or two before you actually do the fronts of all of
your cabinets.
Then if works out fine and there's no problem or whatever, then you can go ahead and do
the outsides of your cabinets or your wood furniture or whatever.
Another thing that I might recommend is that you always want to follow the manufacturer's
specifications and directions on the outside of the container.
I know it sounds really easy for me to say, oh just spray it on there.
When you spray furniture polish on a piece of wood, for example, or a piece of furniture,
some of that gets everywhere else.
It doesn't just only go on the wood.
And then what happens is very few people are actually capable of spraying it evenly.
If you spray it and it lands in one spot and then you try to smear it around, you're going
to have an uneven distribution of furniture polish.
If it's an oil, for example, which is great for filling in the cracks and also great for
nicks and dings, things like that in hardwood floors,
you may want to put it on your microfiber cloth.
I would recommend donating a microfiber cloth just to dusting and furniture polish because
once you get the furniture polish inside that microfiber cloth, it's probably never going
to come clean.
So dedicate that one cloth to your furniture polish.
You might have a light colored and a dark colored microfiber cloth for different colors
of furniture polish because there are different colors.
Now if you have a dark wood that's like a mahogany wood or a cherry wood, you're going
to use a dark liquid furniture polish versus a light liquid furniture polish for lighter
different types of wood.
So again, two different microfiber cloths.
Okay, now the good news is once you have that cloth, even without putting new furniture
polish on it, you can grab that microfiber cloth that you've been using and you can just
touch up the little nicks and dings in the hardwood floors or in the armchairs of the
wooden furniture.
So it's really great if you have one of these and you have it on your person as you're cleaning
a house, you can go, wow, look, there's a new little ding, and cover it in real quick,
and just the reside that's already on your microfiber cloth will fill that in.
Boom, you're done, and it doesn't leave streaks and it doesn't leave marks around that area.
It just fills in the gap.
Okay, so another thing that we have to mention about furniture polish is that there are different
types of furniture polishes for different things.
There are different colors for different types of wood.
If you're going to use a furniture polish, make sure if you're a professional, that before
you start using it in a client's home, that you have the client's permission.
Because if a client is not using furniture polish and they're using the damp microfiber
cloth method, and you come into their house and you start spraying aerosols or a liquid
or using a paste on their furniture, you could be leaving a waxy or residue build-up or something
that's slippery that they're not accustomed to.
It's not something that they want.
This is one of those things that you have to actually ask permission before you start
doing it.
Now if you get to a customer's house and the customer says, "I want you to use this particular
furniture polish," let the customer provide that particular furniture polish.
In my companies, we rarely carry furniture polish with us.
We usually carry a light and a dark liquid in the event that we have something like a
water stain or a heat stain or something like that we're trying to cover up.
And then and only then do we use it with the customer's permission, but it's not a regular
thing that we use most of the time.
If you're a professional and you're doing regular cleaning, maintenance cleaning at
a customer's house, it's unlikely you're going to be using a lot of furniture polish.
Anyway, that's my two cents.
I hope it helps.
Until we meet again,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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