After a resounding vote on a blog post earlier this week, and considering Rob's strong opinion, I've decided to hold off on painting our barn door. As several people pointed out, we can always paint it later after living with it a while.

However, the finish on the door still wasn't great, so I decided to try using Watco Rejuvenating Oil after reading about it on this blog post. I bought it at our favorite home improvement store for about $10.

Holy cow, does that stuff work. We applied it with a soft rag, as the instructions indicated, first testing it on a small corner of the door in case anything funky happened. It just made the corner look glossy and beautiful. As I applied it to the rest of the door, the oil smoothed out the finish that's crackled in some areas and helped disguise some of the scratches and nicks on the door. We wiped it off with a clean rag after 10 minutes, again following the instructions, and now our door is more beautiful than ever.

On a roll, I decided to try it on Rob's scratched dresser. I've wanted to refinish it for a long time, but since it holds tons of clothes, I never got a good opportunity to do so. (And actually, when I read about the Rejuvenating Oil, I originally wanted it for his dresser. The fact that we needed it for the barn door was just the push I needed to buy the stuff.) Here are some photos:

Before

During

After
 

Seriously. The dresser looks about 100 times better, and if I really wanted to get serious about getting rid of the biggest scratches, I could just apply the oil with fine steel wool. Just rubbing it on with a rag made a huge difference for now, though.

It disguised the scratches and made the wood a uniform color. The oil gave it a beautiful gloss and brought out the wood grain. It looks like I spent hours making the dresser beautiful, not 10 minutes.

If you don't have time to refinish furniture, or if you're thinking about selling your house and want to make your woodwork beautiful, buy this stuff (and no one's paying me to say that, I swear). I want to use it on every piece of wooden furniture we own. I will now always keep some on hand. It's that good.

 

Source: karapaslaydesigns.blogspot.com via Meg on Pinterest