Monday, May 10, 2010

Kitchen Maintenance Pt. 1 - Wood

Taking care of the wood items in around the house (and particularly in the kitchen) is something I've been meaning to do for a long long while and I finally got around to it this past week. I gathered as much of my thirsty wood items up from around the house, but of course after I did this I found so many more things to polish that I'm sure I'll be doing this again soon.


I decided to do a little experimenting with different methods for taking care of unfinished wood and used 3 different finishes.

1. plain mineral oil


2. a wood polish that came with a wooden bowl (ingredients are beeswax and natural oils but it doesn't say which ones)


3. I made my own polish. I wanted to try this because not only do I have some lovely beeswax sitting around smelling good and just asking for something to be made with, but also because I want to use something very simple (and preferably homemade) on Q's wooden toys. I also would like to make some wooden toys for him at some point in the future and would love to have a good quantity of wood polish on hand to finish the toys.

After doing some reading online here is how I made my polish

in a wide mouth jar I melted my beeswax on the stovetop.


Added oil (mineral oil is what I had on hand but walnut oil, jojoba oil and/or coconut oil would all be great and what I plan to use next time).


I used a 4 (parts oil) to 1 (part beeswax) ratio and that worked out really well. You could also add some essential oil for scent but I didn't because my beeswax smelled so yummy.


I was impatient for it to cool once it was all mixed together so I used some of the semi-melted polish on these spoons. I also used it on some of Q's wooden cars but once he saw me playing with them he snatched them away from me.

All of the wood looks so beautiful now that it's all polished up - I have to make sure I do this more often. I think I'll stick to the beeswax polishes only next time, the mineral oil by itself seemed to soak right in and not offer much protection.

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