Here's How To Clean Your Water-Stained Wood Cabinets & Bring Them Back To Life

Wooden cabinets, especially in the kitchen, are vulnerable to water stains — those white filmy discolorations that are so stubborn to remove. (There are also dark water stains, but more on that later). As a professional woodworker, I am regularly asked how to remove these frustrating water stains. There is a simple cleaning trick that will remove many white water stains with ease. An oil, like olive oil or mineral oil (my preference), will do the trick. 

The goal is to fill the tiny fracture flaws in the film finish with a substance that will reflect light similarly to the rest of the finish, which the oil should help mimic. Start by cleaning the cabinet with a gentle solution of water and a grease-cutting dish soap, like Dawn, to remove any oily residue. When you are done, wipe the wood down with damp, soap-free cloth. Then get a soft cloth and put a small amount of oil on top of the watermark. Rub the oil into the water stain with a bit of elbow grease. If the stain does not go away right away, let the oil sit for a while (15 minutes), then come back to rub it away. The stain should be much improved. While that works for easy water stains, things get dicier depending on the cause, darkness, and more. Let's figure that out by looking into why they happen in the first place.

White water stains are defects created in the film of a finish and are the result of water sitting on the surface, penetrating the finish through scratches or other flaws in the film coat. Examples of film coats are clear wood finishes, such as lacquer, polyurethane, shellac, and varnish. They lay on top of the wood and are meant to protect the wood itself from damage and discoloration. Water stains are flaws contained within the film that reflect the light differently than the rest of the finish, creating ghostly white discolorations. 

If the water stain is stubborn, you may want to use the mayonnaise wood-cleaning hack to see if it can fade the stain's appearance. Apply a slather of mayonnaise on top of the water mark, leave it overnight, and clean it off in the morning. With luck, the oils in the mayonnaise will fill the water stain flaws. But know this: You may not be able to remove 100% of water stains, such as dark water stains.

With dark water stains, the ones that darken the wood fibers, the task is much harder. Dark water stains occur when water seeps completely through the finish to the wood fibers below. The minerals in the water react with the tannins in the wood, turning the fibers very dark. To remove them, you would need to sand away the finish as well as the darkened wood fibers and then reapply a finish, making it a more challenging cleaning task.