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White Ideas > How to Care for Your New England White Furniture

How to Care for Your New England White Furniture

Date published: 29 June 2011

To clean our furniture we advise using just a damp cloth, with a tiny little bit of washing up liquid if required for more stubborn marks. A white cloth is recommended to prevent any risk of colour transfer - try not to use the yellow dusters as they seem to shed hairs onto the furniture! Be careful not to over wet your cloth; dry the furniture as you go to be sure.

Do not use any sort of furniture polish on our white painted furniture, nor any type of cleaning agent such as antibacterial sprays, kitchen sprays, bathroom sprays - including eco products - as they may have a bleaching agent in them.

Our white furniture is painted with water based paint. We use a water based acrylic paint for the reason that it will stay white as there is no oil in the paint. Paints like gloss and satinwood have oil in them, and the oil will eventually come to the surface and make the furniture look creamy in colour. It is just like in your house, if the architraves around your doors or your skirting boards are painted in white gloss paint, you will notice that they will eventually discolour to a creamy shade. So our furniture is painted with brilliant white acrylic eggshell which gives a smooth satin finish that we know will stay white.

One of the great things about our white furniture and the use of water based paint is that if you want to repaint it either to change the colour, or to give it a new lease of life after a few years, it is very easy to do so. To give you an example, Nick Burrin the Director of New England Lifestyle has the first two bedside tables we ever made, which have been by his bed for over 10 years now. A couple of summers ago he took the bedsides out into the garden, sanded them down very lightly using the very fine grade black sandpaper and gave them two coats of Dulux Brilliant White Acrylic Eggshell. Because the water based paint dries so quickly, the whole process took just three to four hours and the two bedside tables looked brand new. At the time Nick had just moved into a new house and added new pieces of furniture to his room, so by repainting the older furniture he ensured that all his furniture looked pristine and matched perfectly.

The handles on our furniture are an armour bright metal with little indentations in them. Again we recommend cleaning with a damp cloth with maybe a small amount of washing up liquid if required; simply wipe round them and dry them.

If you did happen to damage any of the furniture – for example bashing the leg of a bedside table or chest of drawers with the Hoover, or you may drop something, again it is very easy just to rub down a small surface and touch in the paint. We supply small bottles of touch up paint free of charge specifically for this purpose, or for a larger area lightly sand the surface and repaint with Dulux Brilliant White Acrylic Eggshell.

To ensure you get the best from your furniture, it is important to ensure it is sited correctly - this is of particular importance if you own a large piece of furniture such as a dresser or large chest of drawers. It is essential to make sure that your floors are completely level because if they are just slightly uneven the drawers can catch on the corners, the doors may not open properly, and it may appear as if the doors aren’t aligning properly. It still amazes me how many floors in peoples houses are not even! Even in brand new houses you can find that the screed can fall by about ½ inch. On some of our big dressers that are between six and seven feet long there is quite a distance to cover! Sometimes you may have to buy little plastic wedges from a DIY store like B&Q to ensure that your furniture is sitting perfectly flat and square so that nothing can twist or turn.