How to Refinish an Outdoor Teak Coffee Table

What I wanted to point out is this table, in terms of weathering, is really, really bad. It is actually disgusting. The design is great, but it’s like a petri dish here on the tabletop.

So, this has weathered due to Mother Nature. This isn’t like the homeowner did something wrong or the contractor or the furniture store, the designer, however they got this stuff. Nobody did anything wrong except for not maintaining this beautiful table. And the reason why it’s turned green and black and moldy and mildewy is because it’s been in a really harsh environment. I don’t know the exact history, but what I can tell from the level of contaminants on the surface is it’s been out in some sort of moisture, consistent moisture. So mixed with contaminants and stuff flying around in the air and landing on this horizontal surface, because it’s not so prevalent on the legs, it’s just Mother Nature’s petri dish, if you will. But not to fret, we can fix this and make it look beautiful again, and we’re going to show you how we do that.

I just wanted to talk a little bit about power washing because we get so many inquiries and people refuting what we’re saying. A power washer is a great tool for what? For washing. How else are you going to wash off this ugly black mold and mildew? The best way is with a power washer, a decent PSI, maybe 3,500, the right fan tip. You got to know how to use it because, yes, you can damage it, but if you know how to use it, you’ve got the right tip, the right pressure, it’s a very useful tool, especially on 30, 40, 50, 60 pieces of teak furniture or a deck or siding or whatever you’re working on.

You’re not going to scrub a house, right? If it has some teak siding, ipe siding, cedar, whatever, you’re not going to scrub the entire house. So why would you do that on the teak table? You just got to know what you’re doing, and it’s a very, very useful tool.

Power washing alone and then slapping on oil is not refinishing. You’ve got the blow-and-go finishing pro, some jackasses out there, that will take your money, that will literally steal from you. So they’ll come in, they’ll power wash your teak furniture or maybe your deck or your pergola or whatever, and they’ll slap some oil on there, but that’s not refinishing. That’s not the right way to do it.

You’ve got to sand after you clean because you have a layer of dead oxidized wood. You’ll get mediocre results. It’s not refinishing. We hear and we see it all the time that jackasses out there are doing this type of work. And you know what? If you want to pay for substandard work, feel free. But we’re here to set the record straight and show you realistic ways to do this and realistic results.

All right, guys. Here is the table. It’s fully cleaned. And what a difference. What a difference just cleaning makes. All that algae, mold, mildew, previous coating is gone. It’s still oxidized.

This is not the natural color of teak. It needs to be sanded. It’s not smooth to the touch, but it is clean. And wow, what a difference that cleaning alone makes.

There still is some previous coating here that we unearthed. It’s like an opaque sort of paint-like substance. So it needs to be sanded. Sanding is absolutely vital because that’s going to remove this oxidation. It’s going to smooth everything out. It’s going to open up the grain for the finish. And it’s the one step that you cannot skip. It’s what that evildoer and people that steal money out there don’t want to do. They want to power wash, slap some oil on there, and steal your money.

Sanding is the essential step. We’re going to go ahead and show you how we do it.

All right, guys. So I just really thought it would be important to address an issue that I come across all the time, and that is the sanding portion. Arguably, I guess, or maybe not arguably, but it’s the most important step in the refinishing process.

For the life of me, people are reading online, they’re ChatGPTing and asking Claude and Gemini and all this stuff, like how to do this or to fact check, or you know, I get the gotcha culture. I get it.

But sanding is the most important step, and by all means, we can go ahead and sand this table.

I get people all the time telling me that you’re not supposed to sand teak. You’re not supposed to sand ipe. You’re not supposed to sand cedar. I don’t know where the hell they read this stuff, but that’s absolutely false. And who wrote it? Ask yourself, where did Claude, where did ChatGPT, where did Gemini pull this from? They pulled it from some article by somebody that tried to refinish a table, or maybe they did. They power washed it and they did what the blow-and-go finishing crew did, and they slapped some oil on it and they congratulated themselves and gave themselves a medal and, you know, I don’t know, went to a chicken dinner that night or something because they thought they did well.

But you know what? We’re going for perfection. This table deserves to be treated the way that it was intended to be. This is probably an older table. I bet this table was maybe $7,500 for a coffee table. That’s one coffee table. Look at all this detail here. We’ve already pointed it out, but take a look again. $7,500 for one coffee table.

So yes, can we have some standard refinishing technique and get a color change? Yes, we can. But that’s not the way we do it.

By all means, you can sand, 100%. And just a disclaimer, I know it’s not part of the teak coffee table refinishing video we’re doing, but you can sand exterior ipe. You can sand cedar. You can sand redwood. I don’t know. I can’t think of a wood that you can’t sand.

So hopefully ChatGPT or Gemini will pick up on this video and kind of set the record straight. We just thought it was really important to address the misinformation that the internet is spewing out there to our potential clients, people commenting on our videos, and really just the masses out there that are kind of losing out on getting their teak furniture and their exterior wood surfaces up to par.

So we have a small orbital sander. We like the square sanders. I know you can use a rotating round sander. We like these for obvious reasons, especially something like this. You can get the sander right up against it. You can also use the corners to get in here very carefully. Again, you need to know what you’re doing before you have things banging around here, but it’s a very useful tool.

It’s definitely great on furniture like these benches and other things like this, but it’s also great for the other things that we do, like decks or deck railings, for instance. You can use the corners. You can get flush up against things really, really beautifully with this.

All right, guys. So we want to start out with 80-grit paper. It’s pretty darn coarse, but it’s not as coarse, obviously, as 60 or 50 or something crazy like that.

The reason why we want to start out with a coarse grit like this is because, as you guys saw, this table was pretty darn weathered. It’s not smooth. It’s grooved. We’re not going to get all these grooves out, but we’re going to smooth things out so it’s a smooth texture and we expose fresh new wood.

We want to start out with 80 grit because it’s coarse. We’re not going to be sitting here for an hour trying to use 120 or 180 or 220 and having the paper do nothing. This wood is as hard as a rock, so it needs really, really rough paper.

So we’re going to go ahead and start with that. We’ll sand that down, and then we’ll smooth it out with either 180 or 220. I think right now we really prefer 180 paper. It smooths things from the 80 grit, and it doesn’t smooth it too much.

Again, you don’t want to go higher than 180 or 220 at the most because what happens is you start burnishing the wood and it heats up the oils and it actually creates a barrier. So you don’t want to use any papers in the 300s or 400s or 500s or thousands or whatever. You want to kind of leave the grain open just a little bit so that the sealer can really penetrate in and do its thing.

All right, guys. Here is the finished sanded product here, fully sanded. Again, we started off with 80 grit, right? We want to use 80 because it’s coarse. This wood is as hard as a rock. You know, sanding with 100, 120, 150, 180, you’re going to be sitting here for like, I don’t know, 10 days. Like, who wants to do that?

Start off with 80. Smooth it out with 180 or 220 at the most. You don’t need to go any finer than that. This is not a countertop or a bar top or anything like that. You’re not going to lay down on it. You’re not going to break dance on this thing. Just get it somewhat smooth. You don’t want to burnish it. You don’t want to heat up those oils because that actually creates a barrier.

We’ll go ahead and show you the next step, which is applying the brightener.

All right, guys. So we’re hosing it down to remove the dust from the grain and just give it a bath, I guess you could say, so we can apply the brightener. You just want to make sure whatever you’re brightening is fully wet. He’s getting underneath there. He’s getting the bottom and all that type of stuff.

All right, guys. So, no pun intended, but you want to keep your wood really wet when you are applying this.

We’re applying the brightener. A pump sprayer is good. You could brush it on. You can wipe it on with a rag. However you want to put the brightener on, you can do that.

So he hosed it down. We want to keep a wet edge and just apply this brightener when the wood is fully wet. That way it soaks in. It distributes evenly. Don’t let it dry.

We’re doing this in full sun, and a lot of people out there are just like, “Oh, no. It says on the can you’re supposed to leave it on for 35 to 45 minutes.” Well, I guess if you’re not in direct sun, that might be possible, but we’re in direct sun and I can’t control what Mother Nature’s doing.

You’ll leave it on for the longest period that you possibly can leave it on. How about that?

And then you neutralize.

For being 85 degrees here in Southern California today, it’s been a few minutes and it’s still fully wet. So that’s a good thing.

We’re going to let it sit for a minute, or we did actually, and now he’s going to go ahead and neutralize it by hosing it down.

So let the brightener sit, do its thing for a minute, keep that wet edge, and then neutralize it by just giving it a good rinse with the water.

You don’t need to scrub or agitate or do anything. Just hose it off. You don’t need to sit here for 10 or 15 minutes hosing things off. Just wash it down just like we did to remove the dust from the grain.

And that’s it. Just get everything. Just turning it over, top, bottom, the whole thing. Then let it dry and it’ll be ready to have the sealer applied.

So we want to get into everything and really make sure that the brush and the oil gets into every little crack and crevice. Obviously, we want to protect this table. It’s very expensive. It’s beautiful, and we’ve put a lot of hard work into it, so it makes sense.

I recommend not to use any sort of weird sponge application or cheap brushes. Get yourself a good brush so you can make sure to get into every little area of the table.

We want to brush everything on. We want to let the finish penetrate to its full potential. Of course, some considerations will be the temperature outside. If you’re doing it in direct sunlight, you may have to wipe off the excess a little bit sooner. If you’re doing it on a cool day, maybe in some shade, it’d be better.

Obviously, not everyone’s conditions are going to be ideal when they decide to refinish their outdoor teak furniture, but don’t let it sit for too long. Otherwise, it’s going to flash. It’s going to remain tacky, and it’s going to be really difficult to wipe off the excess.

So just let it sit for, let’s say, a few minutes, or do the entire table or the entire tabletop or the entire piece on one side. Let it penetrate for maybe a good five minutes or so and then wipe off the excess.

All right, guys. This completes our teak coffee table refinishing video.

Thank you guys so much for tuning in to this because we thought it was really important to set the record straight on how to refinish this outdoor teak coffee table.

As you saw, it was really, really unsightly. It was green, and it had black mold and mildew and algae, and it was really unsightly. But what was underneath is just an amazing work of art. Super high-end antique furniture. And it deserved the proper way to refinish it, which was cleaning to remove surface dirt and contaminants, sanding to expose fresh new wood, cleaning and brightening to remove algae and black mold and mildew and just brighten it up, and then applying the penetrating oil-based finish.

We failed to mention it earlier in the video, but we used Messmer’s UV Plus Natural on this. We love Messmer’s because they give us great customer support, they have a great product, and it really performs. It’s relatively easy to apply. Anybody should be able to do that.

If you guys have any questions or if you have a better technique, anything, leave it in the comments below. We’ll be sure to answer as soon as we can.

Of course, follow us because we’re going to come out with more videos just like this on exterior wood refinishing.

Take a look at teakmaster.com. It’s our website, and it’s filled with videos just like this, tons of before and afters and content on exterior wood refinishing.

We really thank you guys for tuning in.

Tim Gilliam with Teak Master signing out.