Once upon a time, about fifteen years ago, a sweet friend of our family offered to share her old wrought iron patio chairs and table with us. Being new homeowners, my husband and I jumped at the chance of being given nice, sturdy, outside furniture. We’ve always “lived outside the box,” so taking other people’s old items and making them our treasures is nothing new! 🙂 We used the wrought iron furniture for a while, but then it became a little less-than-stable and we moved it to the “back 40.” It’s actually taken a lot longer than we ever anticipated to restore our wrought iron patio furniture because, well, they were covered with weeds!!! But making “new” beautiful wrought iron furniture is definitely possible! Keep reading to see how you can restore your wrought iron patio furniture and make it new again.

After digging our wrought iron furniture out of the weeds… I mean, storage… the above it what we had to work with. As you can see, the table has a serious sway-back issue, one chair has completely collapsed into pieces, and the last chair standing is missing some of the wood from the seat. We had a long way to go to make this furniture usable again. How did we get started??? It’s much easier than you think!

How to Restore Your Wrought Iron Patio Furniture…

1. First, you’ll want to measure. We measured the old wood to see how large and long each piece needed to be for the furniture. The wrought iron has predrilled holes, so the replacement boards couldn’t be too wide or they wouldn’t work.
2. Next, comes removal…you may want to wear gloves. We removed all the old wood, being careful to pick up the bolts, washers, and screws so they didn’t end up some place they shouldn’t. (My tire, perhaps???)
3. Decide on the type of wood you’d like to use to repair your wrought iron furniture. We decided to use cedar boards, after pricing several options at our local home improvement center. Cedar holds up well to the elements and it has a pretty grain. For this project, we purchased 1×3-inch cedar boards. We also purchased new bolts and washers made of stainless steel…we didn’t want them to rust over time.
4. Route edges of boards, if necessary. In our case, all the boards needed to have the edges routed, so we used a 1/4″ roundover bit in the router. We then sanded each board very, very, well. No one wants a splinter in their bum!
   
5. Finally, you can deal with the wrought iron itself. Using a wire brush, my husband went over each piece of wrought iron to remove any rust. He also removed any of the shiny finish remaining from the original paint for better new paint adhesion.
6. Clean, clean, clean! 🙂 It’s best to clean each piece of the wrought iron well prior to painting to assure good paint adhesion. I scrubbed each piece with Simple Green and a brush, but any degreaser would probably work. After drying, I added a coat of primer. This primer helps keep rust from starting. Notice I placed each piece on bricks to keep it up out of the grass, painting one side at a time.
7. After the primer is dry on both sides of the wrought iron pieces, it’s time to add the top coat. I chose to use a final black top coat and decided on a semigloss versus a glossy finish. I really like how it turned out! Though I would definitely recommend not painting on a windy or hot day. The wind makes painting difficult, and if it’s too hot, the paint won’t dry correctly. This is part of the reason this project took a few weeks. I had to wait for the right weather.
8. It’s time to cut the wood! We used the miter box saw to cut each piece of wood to length. (Yes, we still had a pile of the old stuff laying around to use as examples.) Also, a couple pieces around the back had to be ripped to size on the table saw.  But other than that, the cutting went really quickly.
9. Predrill holes in the wood. We predrilled holes for the bolts. The wood we purchased was actually thicker than the original, so we countersank the bolts by using a larger drill bit to clean the hole after drilling with the proper size. This allowed the bolts to sit down in the wood instead of on the top.
10. Time to put everything together!!! It’s just like a big puzzle. My husband held the legs while I inserted bolts in the wood and placed it on the frames. We then added the washers and nuts and tightened everything together.

Overall, I’m extremely pleased with how the patio set looks on our front porch! Hopefully, this post will help you restore your wrought iron patio furniture, too! It was very easy, just a little time-consuming. (No, not 15-years-time-consuming!) I’m planning to add a layer of boiled linseed oil to the wood to help protect it. However, that can wait as I’m off to enjoy my front porch and a cup of tea! 🙂

If you are interested in restoring other outdoor furniture, please check out my post on How to Refurbish a Patio Table and Chairs. Twas the year of furniture redos at our house, me thinks!

I’d love to hear how your restoration goes! If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email. I’d be happy to try to help. 🙂 Happy Restoring!!!

I used the items below to complete the above project. If you happen to purchase anything from these links, I may receive a small commission, though you will be charged nothing extra. Any commissions help to pay fees to keep my blog running. 🙂 I greatly appreciate your support. Thank you!