Baby Steps

If you read this blog, you already know I am cheap.
If you've read this blog for any length of time,
you probably also know that I am lazy.

So when I find a cheap piece of furniture in need of a miracle, I look first for an easy way to fix it.
In this case, by cheap furniture I mean free.  See yesterday's blog.  

Free washstand or telephone table.  In rough shape but sturdy.
Puts the shabby in chic, that's for sure.

And by in need of a miracle, I mean in really awful condition.

See?  I am not kidding.

Is there any way to handle this without having to do any actual work?


I plan on putting this little guy in my antiques booth and selling him for
hundreds and hundreds of dollars . . . Not.  Maybe tens of dollars.

Howard to the rescue.  No, not my husband Howard, although he rescues me all the time.
This time, it's the Howard Company, which makes wood care products, including this:

Feed-N-Wax.

The Lazy Lady's Best Friend -- a mix of waxes and a bit of orange oil.

Available on Amazon, at Home Depot, and probably at your local hardware store.

Here's what I did while watching the noon news today:  I wiped on the Feed-N-Wax . . . 

. . . a nice generous coat.  Then, I relaxed for about 20 minutes, and followed up with a

good buffing with a clean cotton cloth, to get rid of the oily sheen and bring up the waxy gleam.

There's Dion, sound asleep, behind the table.  I never wax him.  Almost never, anyway.

 It is not perfect, not by a very long shot.  It still is beat up and, ahem, rugged.

But it does look better, and who knows?

Someone may fall in love with this little street kid and want him "as is."

If not, I haul him home again from the antiques booth, and do him up right --

melting his finish and reamalgamating it.  How's that for a 64-cent word?

Or, I paint him.  We'll see.  But my bet is that priced right, he'll sell.

I used Feed-N-Wax on another table in December, wrote about it here.

In 30 minutes, that table went from this, stripped and dull:

to this:

I put it in my booth on a Sunday, late in the day.

It sold the very next day.  Thank you, Feed-N-Wax.  :-)

The only problem is that I really liked this table, and I kind of miss it.  Oh well.

We have to let them grow up and toddle out into the big world, I guess.

Tomorrow -- more on The Mystery Chest from Wednesday's post:

I think we're getting close to consensus on what it is.

No Link Parties today for me -- I can't figure out where to put "ugly furniture badly restored."

Maybe I need to start my own blog party -- Cass