So you believed the salesman when he told you that teak wood furniture required no maintenance at all. The real question is was the cool-aid cherry or grape.

The reality of the situation is that if you don’t mind you teak furniture looking dingy gray with mold and often moss growing on it you are good to go. However if you want your teak to look like it did when you unpacked it, there is a bit more that needs to happen.

A realization that raw unfinished teak does not look good for very long is a pivotal conclusion. There are some sealing finishes for teak that will look good for a year or so and then they begin to peal off and you have to sand the rest off before you start re-coating. This repeated sanding will eventually reduce you teak to dust!

Further, several of the teak cleaners available at your friendly neighborhood marina or grocery store have either sodium hydroxide or sodium hypochlorite (chlorine bleach) in them. Both will damage the surface of your teak wood by attacking and weakening the micro-fibers that hold the wood together.

Using a water water based degreaser to remove the gray teak resin is a much better solution and it does not damage the wood before coating the teak with what ever you choose to use. Most of the teak coatings are sealers. They do not allow the wood to breath, and as a result, will eventually blister and peal off at least in sections. There are now several teak finishes that do breath. These products are generally made of water based polymer resins that when dry are gas permeable.  This allows the water vapor (that is produced when the sun shines on the wood and finish) to escape without generating the small high pressure pocket of water vapor between the wood (that does not breath) and the finish.