The air in your home is full of pollutants, such as smoke from cigarettes, cigars, and pipes; grease from the kitchen; This grime can attach itself to furniture over a long periods of time. When you use furniture polish, the oils mix with these air pollutants and dead skin, and the result is a film that slowly covers the wood. This gradual process may not be noticeable at first, as you slowly forget the original color of the wood. On a chair stored in the basement or attic, the finish may be almost black by the time you get around to cleaning it. All that dirt will not only hide the wood and the finish, but also exacerbates cracks and other serious wood damage. There are three basic ways to clean furniture: The one you select depends on both your priorities, the nature of the dirt, and in part the furniture itself. Cleaning With Commercial Wood CleanersYou can find commercial wood cleaner in most hardware stores or home goods stores. Look for a product designed to remove old wax and dirt.
Most of these products include either turpentine or mineral-spirit formulations. Mixtures that offer "conditioning" as well as cleaning properties usually contain an oil of some type, which is deposited on the wood as it is cleaned. Avoid these, since your goal is to clean down to the bare finish. Instead, select those designed specifically for wax and grime removal. Step 1: Preparing the Product Most mineral-spirit formulations work best in warm temperatures (70 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer), and when they themselves have been warmed up a bit. However, never heat any of these products over an open flame! Instead, place the cleaning bottle inside another container of warm water for 10 minutes. Step 2: Applying the Product Read the manufacturer's directions and follow them closely. Generally, you will be told to dip a soft, clean cloth (cheesecloth is excellent) in the cleaner, and to then wipe it over the surface of the furniture. Usually, the idea is to apply a coat of the cleaner and let it stand for 10 minutes or so to allow the chemicals to do their work.
After the old wax or film has softened, you will wipe the wood again with a cloth dampened with more cleaner to remove the residue. If the piece is very dirty, you may have to repeat the process several times. Some people like to rub and scrub the surface, but it usually isn't necessary. The mineral spirits will likely do their work if you let them sit for a while. Use an old toothbrush or small cotton swabs to get into corners and carvings. Cleaning Wooden Furniture With Dish Detergent and Water You can clean old furniture with a mixture of warm water and dish soap. The detergent-and-water method is not the best, and I really don't recommend it if you have other options. But if you do it with care, it works. The mild detergents are the least likely to harm the wood's finish, while cutting grease and wax effectively. However, this procedure is best used on furniture that has been painted, enameled, or varnished; and will cause lacquer and shellac finishes to turn white as they absorb water.
Keep in mind that water is an enemy of wood. It can cause swelling, discoloration, and warping when applied to bare wood. It can soften some glues or cause veneers to separate from the base wood. For these reasons, don't soak the detergent-and-water solution generously over the wood. Instead, wipe with a cloth moistened in the mixture, and rub the wood with the cloth. The detergent needs time to soften the grease and wax, so leave the surface moist for awhile and then re-wipe. Finally, go over the piece with a cloth moistened in clear water to remove the detergent. Allow the piece to dry completely before attempting to apply any kind of finish or before sanding. Cleaning Wood With Trisodium Phosphate (TSP) Trisodium phosphate (TSP) is a heavy-duty cleaner, used by painters to clean mildew and accumulated dirt from exterior walls. It can be used on very dirty furniture, but I would recommend it only on painted, enameled, or varnished pieces; and not on veneers, shellac, or lacquer finishes.
TSP is a "last resort" cleaner, used when a piece has been sitting in the garage for 10 years and is in really bad shape.Step 1: Preparing the Mixture Make a mixture of two tablespoons of TSP and one quart of warm water. Step 2: Applying the Mixture Because it is a powerful chemical, you must wear rubber gloves and safety goggles when using TSP. You don't want a chemical burn, and no matter how careful you may be, any liquid can splash or splatter. Letting the Furniture Dry and Checking the FinishWhatever cleaning method you decided to use, allow the furniture to dry for at least 24 hours before doing anything to it, including sanding. You'll only be able to see the full effect of the cleaning when the surface and the wood are totally dry. The day after you clean the furniture piece, look at the finish and decide whether or not it needs to be repaired. If possible, you want to save the original finish, so look it over with this in mind. If the majority of the finished surface appears to be in good shape, but there are some damaged areas, consider just making finish repairs instead of stripping and refinishing.
If you have an incredible piece of furniture that requires no repair at all, simply apply a good furniture wax (preferably a paste type) with a cheesecloth pad, allow it to dry, and then buff it with the buffing pad in your electric drill. Or, you can apply a lemon oil polish.Peter revisits an earlier tip on how to use stored procedures to speed up your code. This version makes your stored procedures simpler … though you may have to write a little more code to make the call. In an earlier column, I suggested that one way to speed up your application was to reduce the trips you make to your database, specifically by avoiding calling a stored procedure multiple times. To enable that, I showed how to pass a stored procedure multiple parameter values in a single call and then, inside the stored procedure, load the parameters into a table where they could be integrated with other SQL statements. As several readers pointed out, I used very old-fashioned technology to implement this tactic: I concatenated all of the parameters into a string and then, in the stored procedure, broke the string into parts before loading those parts into a table.
While my code worked in every version of SQL Server, it was hardly "hip and happening." But, if you're using any version of SQL Server later than SQL Server 2005, you have an alternative: table-valued parameters. Table-valued parameters let you pass a collection of table rows as a parameter to your stored procedure. The benefit of passing table rows is you can short circuit some of the stored procedure code from my previous column: It's no longer necessary to break up the string (I used a set of T-SQL code I "borrowed" from a client to do that) or insert the values into a table because your parameters are already in a table. In the examples for this column, I use ADO.NET, but these techniques work equally as well if you're calling your stored procedures from an Entity Framework DbContext object (as I've discussed in a previous column). Accepting Table Valued Parameters To use table-valued parameters you first need, in SQL Server Manager, to define a table type to your database.
This example defines a table type called JobSpecifications with two columns called JobName and AvailableDate: With the type defined, you can now use it as a parameter in any stored procedure where it makes sense. This example uses the type to accept one or more rows of the JobSpecifications type in a parameter called @JobCriteria: In the body of the stored procedure, you can use the parameter like any other table. This example joins the parameter to another table in the actual database to find some matching rows and return the result: But, while everything is better on the T-SQL side of the processing, the code to call the stored procedure can be a little uglier because, under the worst possible scenario, the values you're passing are just sitting around in variables in your application. In that scenario you need to create a DataTable with columns that match your table type and then load it with rows. For example, code to create a DataTable that matches my JobSpecifications type would look like this:
This code creates a row from the DataTable, populates the two columns in the row and then adds the row to the table: Finally, of course, I need to pass the DataTable to the stored procedure: If this looks a little intimidating, it is the worst-possible scenario -- many other scenarios are simpler. If, for example, your parameters are in a DataTable in a DataSet, you can just pass the DataTable as your parameter. This example passes a DataTable called Parms in the DataSet held in a variable called ds (this will also work with any method that returns a DataTable, though not with any method that returns some collection of DataRows): If you're reading your parameters from a table through a DataReader, then you can pass the DataReader as your parameter. This example uses the AddWithValue method on the Parameters collection to pass a DataReader called rdrParms: There doesn't, however, seem to be a simple way to pass the results of a LINQ query to a table-valued parameter.