Hello and Welcome to Bearfort Lodge. I hope that you enjoy your visit and find the information you seek. Please feel free to leave a comment. -- Bearfort

Cleaning old wood can be tricky. I have found that many commercial wood cleaners can be much too harsh. I don’t want to raise the grain and end up with a fuzzy surface nor do I want to damage the underlying finish if there is one.

Pressure washing on a log home is out of the question.

The task at hand here is to clean the old logs on the veranda. They have probably never been cleaned and are mostly black from years of soot and general grime from when this place was a tavern and relied on coal and wood to heat.

Percarbonate based cleaners, those with sodium peroxydicarbonate, brighten the wood. Cleaners such as this tend to be a bit too aggressive for what I’m trying to do and if using them I stand a greater chance ending up with a fuzzy finish. I have tried using a very mild and gentle soap on these particular logs in the past but to no avail. And going more aggressive with TSP was not an option.

Oxalic acid will return old weathered dirty wood to its original color and is great for fences, gates, and decks. Oxalic acid will also help to remove nail stains and is the main ingredient in numerous and popular wood cleaning and brightening products. You can purchase straight oxalic acid in bulk powder form so that you can make your own solution at a tremendous savings. But in this case I do not want to lose the patina of old wood.

For these particular logs I used a home brew. (You can see the result: the before photos are on the right and the after photos are on the left) I needed something that would be aggressive enough to cut through what seems to be a thick greasy soot like grime but gentle enough that I don’t bleach the log.

For this I use a mix of Cascade dish washer soap, water and an oxygenator. Cascade is very effective at stripping away greasy substances.

Mix about 1/2 cup of Cascade dish soap and 1/4 cup OxiClean in 3 quarts of very warm water until completely dissolved. Once dissolved I add another quart of hot water.

I simply wipe the solution onto the log using a rag and let it set for a minute or two and then after re-wetting the rag I wipe the logs again. There is no need to scrub nor do I recommend scrubbing, just let the solution do all the work. Cascade has a number of very effective surfactants and will make the wood feel a little slick while wet.

After a couple of minutes I wipe the grime off the log and rinse the log with a damp cloth of clean water and let it dry.

Cleaning the logs here needed only one application of the cleaner however there are a few spots where I could probably go back and touch up carefully.

Cleaning these particular logs was a special situation. Regular cleaning of all the logs throughout the lodge is normally accomplished with lemon oil.

Are there any home brew cleaners that you have used that you would recommend for special applications?