Wooden Nickel Home

Teak oil is the most misunderstood bottle on the shelf. It is not pressed from teak, it does not feed the timber, and it is not one formula. Most tins hold a thinned blend of a drying oil, usually linseed or tung, with a varnish component and a solvent to make it flow.

What it does is soak a short distance into the surface fibres and then cure there, hardening in contact with air. The result is a finish that lives just below the surface rather than sitting on top of it as a film. That is why an oiled piece looks like wood rather than like a wood-coloured sheet of plastic, and it is why oiled surfaces mark so easily.

Almost every badly hung picture in a house is hung too high. The eye expects the centre of a picture to sit at standing eye level, which for most rooms works out somewhere between 145 and 155 centimetres from the floor, and a picture hung above that line reads as floating.

The arithmetic is simple enough to do on the back of an envelope. Take the height of the frame and halve it. Add the number you want for the centre line. Then subtract the drop, which is the distance from the top edge of the frame down to the taut hanging wire or the hook plate. The result is where the nail goes.

The first instinct with an old piece is to strip it back and start again. It is worth sitting on that instinct for a week, because a stripped surface can never be unstripped and the wear pattern that annoys you is often the most interesting thing about the object.

A finish records use. The lighter band along the front edge of a desk is where forearms rested. The dull ring on a side table is a glass. The paler patch on a chair arm is a hand, thousands of times. Sanding that away produces a surface with no history and, very often, a pale bruised look where the old colour was only ever skin deep.

A tabletop takes more punishment than any other horizontal surface in a house, and the choice of finish is really a choice about who does the maintenance and when.

Wax is a soft surface coat. It buffs to a low shine, feels wonderful under a hand, and offers almost no resistance to water or heat. A wet glass left on waxed timber will leave a white ring within the hour. The ring is usually shallow enough to be buffed out, which is the trade: easy to damage, easy to repair, and the repair needs no skill.

A chair that creaks is telling you that one joint has opened. Ignoring it is the expensive option, because a loose joint grinds itself oval every time somebody sits down, and an oval mortise is a much harder problem than a loose one.

The cause is almost always the same. Old animal glue is brittle and gives up, or the timber has shrunk across its width during years of dry indoor heat. The joint itself is usually undamaged.