How To: Remove Water Marks from Wood

Your kid set a water glass down on your grandmother’s antique wooden table and now there’s a huge water mark right in the middle! Disaster! Or not…

We scoured the web for easy ways to fix those pesky white rings. Here are some of our favorite methods:

The Mayo Method:

Spoon a generous amount of mayonnaise onto the water stain and rub it in with a paper towel. Allow the mayonnaise to remain on the stain for several hours or overnight. In the morning, wipe off the excess mayonnaise. Use a paper towel and rub the remaining mayonnaise into the wood.

Heat:
Place a towel over the stain. Set your iron to medium and carefully put it on top of the cloth for a few seconds only and remove. Repeat until the water stain is removed from the wood.
You can also use a hair dryer. Just use the low setting and aim at the stain.

Steel Wool and Lemon Oil:
Use a pad of very fine steel wool and drench it with lemon oil. The lemon oil won’t remove the stain, but it lubricates the steel wool so that it doesn’t scratch the wood.
Very gently buff out the white ring with the fine steel wool.

Cigarette Ash:
Make a paste out of olive oil and cigarette ash. Work this slowly into the mark. You'll see the stain coming out as you rub in the paste. This works best if your wood is dark and polished, like mahogany.

Petroleum Jelly:
Apply the petroleum jelly over the affected area and allow it to sit there for eight hours. The trapped moisture under the wood's finish will be replaced by the jelly. Check the progress. If there's still a faint sign of the water mark, leave it for a few more hours. Check again, and if no more mark remains, wipe clean with a cloth.