Furniture restoration — using beeswax polish to renovate sun bleached and water damaged wood.

A small brush is useful in detailed furniture restoration projects

Ok, so its not exactly "furniture", but this little Indian hardwood box is an ideal piece to demonstrate how useful our brown beeswax polish is for furniture restoration and treating this kind of damage.

It had been left unattended on a windowsill where it suffered from both sun-bleaching and water damage from condensation.

When it comes to wood furniture restoration, the kind of results you get are going to depend on the type of wood. In this case, the Indian hardwood is nothing special, so it's not going to get the kind of glow that can be gained on a quality piece of red oak, for example. But it shouldn't be hard to make it look respectable again.

My preferred method for dealing with a small decorative furniture restoration project like this is simply to apply a small amount of polish two or three times a day for about three days. If you apply the polish sparingly, a bit at a time, you don't end up with too much vigorous buffing to do. Also when using brown beeswax polish in furniture restoration, using a little bit at a time allows you to judge the level of staining you want to achieve, so you can stop when you have the desired effect.

I did not sand or even scrub the box before I started this mini furniture restoration project. I just started to apply the beeswax polish. The pierced lid was the only fiddly bit on this piece. A useful tip with this kind of detailed decorative furniture restoration is to use a small brush to work the polish into the cut-outs.

So, here are some before and after shots. I was really impressed with the results and I think the pictures speak for themselves... NB. I shot all these pics under natural sunlight, just inside the roller door of our unit.

Would love to know what you think, or if you had tried anything similar, so let me know what you think by leaving a comment.