5 Ways to Maintain Your Dining Room Furniture
A formal dining room is one of the best entertainment spots in a home. Even if your home doesn’t have a formal dining room, a dining space is a great spot to entertain family and friends on both formal and casual occasions. Since you have so many guests around, you’ll want to have a good table and plenty of seats to accommodate everyone.
Our dining table and chairs on credit will give you what you need at a price you can afford. Once you get them home and are ready to entertain with them, make sure you take care of them so that they’ll last for years. Keep reading to learn about five ways to maintain your dining room furniture.
Use Protective Items
While many people think that a dining room table can withstand wear and tear, that doesn’t give anyone free rein to do whatever they want to your table. No matter what material makes up your dining room table, whether marble, glass, or wood, you need to protect it.
Extremely hot and cold items can cause some of the worst damage to your tabletop. Since dining tables are where people eat and drink, you may find it difficult to protect your table from hot and cold cups and plates, but you can. For hot or cold drinks or anything small that’s prone to sweat, you can use coasters. You can find coasters in any design you like that will complement your table and dining room, or you can find special coasters for specific occasions. As long as you’re using coasters, any choice is fine.
For hot or cold plates, use placemats. Placemats will also protect part of your table from unintended scratches from silverware, so you have two reasons to use them. You can choose to put placemats under hot or cold serving dishes or cover the entire table in a tablecloth for complete protection.
Wipe the Table Down After Meals
Unfortunately, even protective measures like coasters and tablecloths can’t completely protect your table. When drinks spill or someone drops food, residue can easily soak through a tablecloth and onto your table. While many people don’t see this as a problem since tables have protective finishes, you don’t want to leave the spill unattended any longer than you have to.
Otherwise, you risk damaging the protective finish, which means you’ll have to re-finish the table as soon as possible. For tables made of marble or glass that don’t require the same finishes as wood, you’ll still want to clean the table quickly to avoid stains.
After your guests leave and you clean up, make sure to wipe the entire table down with a damp cloth. If a spill happens in a certain area, pay more attention to that area as you clean. Use a bright light to determine whether the spill has left a stain behind. If there is a stain, don’t use a chemical cleaner on it, as this can damage the finish. Instead, use soap and water and a microfiber cloth.
Watch Your Movements
Even though dining tables can hold lots of heavy china dishes and platters of food, you need to treat them carefully. While the legs of the table can hold a lot of weight, the top of your table is there to look pretty. You don’t want to damage that pretty design with carelessness.
We’ve already discussed using coasters, placemats, and tablecloths to protect your table, as well as keeping the table as clean as possible. But there are little things that can also damage your table. Sliding a heavy plate or dish across the table, even with a tablecloth down, can scratch its surface, especially if it’s glass.
Heavy jewelry and watches can also scratch your dining surface if someone reaching for a dish drags them across the table. Everyone around your table needs to watch their movements, from how they handle their plates to what they do with their hands, so that your table stays as nice as when you first brought it home.
Dust Without Chemicals
As we mentioned above, chemical cleaners can hurt the finish on your wooden dining table. Some marble tables also have a finish on the top that requires expert care. And even though glass doesn’t have a specific finish, you still need to care for it properly. No matter the surface of your dining table, you’ll need to dust it when you’re not using it. If your dining table hosts all your meals, you still need to make time to dust it regularly so that it remains clean.
While dusting, don’t use chemical cleaners. They can hurt the finish and make your table dirtier in the long run. The chemicals in the cleaners can produce a temporary shine, but they end up capturing dust and holding it on your table, making it look dirtier than it should be after a clean. Avoid these cleaners and use a damp microfiber cloth to dust.
Arrange Your Dining Room Wisely
Perhaps the most important way to maintain your dining room furniture is to arrange it wisely. While all of these maintenance tips will help protect your table from purposeful wear and tear, there are other elements that you’ll also need to protect your table and chairs from.
Those elements are natural elements. Sunlight and heat can easily damage your table and chairs over time in a way that no one notices until you look back at pictures. Don’t end up looking back and wishing you’d taken better care of your furniture in the past. Arrange your dining area so that your table and chairs are out of direct sunlight and away from direct heat.
If your dining area has too many windows to avoid direct sunlight, either keep protective clothes over your furniture or add some form of window covering to the windows. Most forms of direct heat are avoidable, but if you can’t avoid them, place protective clothes over the furniture closest to the heat source.
After you bring home your dining table and chairs on credit, there are five ways you can maintain them. Using protective items, wiping the table down, watching your movements, dusting without chemicals, and wisely arranging your room are the best ways to keep your dining room furniture in great shape.
