Garden Furniture | Key Considerations in Choosing Outdoor Garden Furniture

Choosing garden furniture can be a difficult but fun task because of the huge range of outdoor garden furniture options available. With Teak garden furniture, rattan, wicker, resin, plastic and metal it can be confusing as to which outdoor garden furniture might suit your needs best.
Hopefully this article will help you in choosing the right outdoor patio furniture for your property.

Wooden Garden Furniture

Wooden garden furniture will present you with a great range of materials to choose from such as North American grown wood such as pressure-treated pine, redwood, cypress and cedar.

Popular choices for patio furniture from tropical woods include mahogany, teak, ipe, balau, jarrah and iroko.

Advantages of Wooden Garden Furniture

Wooden garden furniture advantages include the natural weathering process that enhances your garden furniture and which will give the effect of your wooden patio furniture blending in very well to it’s surrounding environment as it weathers.

Wooden garden furniture tends to be much sturdier than it’s plastic or metal counterpart and North American wood products will last up to 25 years whilst the tropical wood products can last from 50 to 80 years. So wooden garden furniture is a great long term investment.

However wooden outdoor furniture will require more maintenance than other choices and North American wood products will require repainting and a regular application of a preservative. Wooden furniture is also heavy and while this is an advantage when the wind blows it can be a pain in the butt if you are someone who likes or needs to move it around often or when the mood takes you.

Metal Garden Furniture

Metal garden furniture offers the advantage of being very low maintenance, flexible insofar as it is easy to move around as the mood takes you and is very long lasting. Metal outdoor furniture will also come in many shapes, sizes and designs as it is very easy to shape at the design/manufacturing stage.

Metal outdoor furniture will generally be made from  aluminium or wrought iron. Wrought iron is pretty heavy although you can get wheels fitted if this is an issue for you. Wrought iron furniture can rust however and will heat up and cool down with the air temperature.

Aluminum is a lighter and perhaps more flexible option if you choose to go the metal garden furniture route but can fly around the place on a windy day and some people don’t like the look of tubular aluminium as it appears flimsy.

Metal furniture should come with a long warranty and is low maintenance and long lasting.

Caring For Your Metal Furniture

Maintenance for metal furniture is not too onerous and aluminum can be protected with car wax and can be cleaned with soapy water.

Wrought iron furniture can also be cleaned with mildly warm soapy water.

Plastic Garden Furniture

Plastic garden furniture is a cheap, cheerful and flexible option for your patio or deck. It can also be blown away in the wind but a 5 piece dining set will cost you from $50 to $200 so plastic outdoor furniture certainly offers value for money. Maintenance is a snap just requiring hosing down with your garden hose and one of the great advantages of plastic garden furniture is that it is stackable and can be put away in minutes being so light and flexible.