Can my antique record cabinet be saved?

July 12, 2008 3:03 PM

Hand sanitizer stained (really, lightened) my antique furniture. Is there a remedy?

I have an antique record cabinet (1920s-ish, I think) in the baby's room. A pump bottle of Purell hand sanitizer was on top of it. Some stray sanitizer hit the face of the cabinet and its top and reacted in some way with the finish. Now there are whitish streaks where it landed and was absorbed. Any ideas on what might fix it? I tried some 0000 steel wool on one of the small spots on the top. This seemed to lighten it and the rest as well, but might work. It is the streak on the door is the most worrisome part.

posted by wheat to home & garden (2 comments total)

Is it a sort of a cloudy white spot? Like what happens when wood gets wet? If so, you might rub a little bit of mayonnaise into the finish.
posted by Addlepated at 3:33 PM on July 12

Purell is 62% ethanol (alcohol, same kind you drink), the rest water and other. What happened to it kind of depends on the finish. The ethanol may have dissolved the finish and essentially stripped it in the spots. It's also possible that the ethanol evaporated and the water clouded the finish, which is a pretty common reaction of water-based solutions on finished wood. In that case the finish has actually absorbed the water, which is what is causing the white, cloudy appearance.

At this point I think you have to evaluate if this thing is actually an antique and genuinely valuable, in which case you should probably look at getting it professionally restored (and take it out of the baby's room), or if it is something of a more sentimental value, in which case you have to weigh that value against the cost of professional restoration versus DIY and potentially screwing it up worse. If you decide to go the DIY route, check this resource out. However, you face the problem that some of the suggested fixes (i.e. alcohol-damp cloth for water clouding stains) could make other possible causes (stripping off alcohol-soluble finish) worse. I think abrasive treatment including steel wool doesn't make any sense, the only thing you're going to accomplish is rubbing off finish and if you're ending up with some sort of selective strip and touch-up solution, an abrasive is not the way to strip.
posted by nanojath at 3:34 PM on July 12