A few weeks ago, I noticed a victorian set of end tables in the back of our large item garbage pickup truck. I was
really tempted to chase him down and ask for the tables. It's amazing how many wonderful pieces of wood furniture end up in the landfill every year simply because the wood starts to dull. You see, when wood is shiny and new from the factory, it has usually been sealed with a highly toxic varnish coat that helps it retain moisture and color. Through exposure to sunlight, elements, or even just general use over time, the clear coat wears off and the wood starts to experience decay and damage. When this happens, most people either decide to get rid of the furniture altogether or apply a new coat of varnish. The problem is that both of these common solutions involve unnecessary pollution - both in the landfill or in offgassing toxic fumes into your home for months or years to come. In the case of damaged wood furniture, why not take the item apart and repurpose the undamaged parts for new projects? Donate them to a local children's scout troop for crafts? Or donate the piece to an organization in great need (remember, one person's trash can be another person's treasure)?
However, in many cases that don't involve physical damage beyond color and moisture loss, beauty to wood furniture can be restored quickly, easily, and safely through the use of a natural wood polish product such as
Daddy Van's All Natural Furniture Polish. We decided to put this polish to the test on oak cabinets which had been neglected (read: no polish) for nearly two decades. With UV damage to the clear coat, the wood has dried out and the color has dulled. We were not expecting a miracle, but we definitely wanted to add some moisture back into the cabinets. To be fair, we tested one set of cabinets with an olive oil based polish and another set with
Daddy Van's All Natural Furniture Polish, which is beeswax based. The olive oil polish soaked in and begged for more, the wood was very thirsty. We soon realized that the olive oil polish would prove to be an expensive and time-consumptive process. The beeswax polish required only a single coat (applied with an old cotton sock, you know, the ones we've been begging you to repurpose into rags) and provided immediate aesthetic improvement!
Being the dedicated testers we are, we wanted to see how much area you could cover with one small container of
Daddy Van's Furniture Polish. At first, it took a bit more to saturate the sock with beeswax, but after a few cabinet doors, the sock was primed and it only took very little for each subsequent cabinet. And so we worked and worked on the tester's kitchen long into the night, the next day we went back to work on adjacent baseboards and window sills....yet still there was much more left in the tin. And so, our answer for your inevitable question, "How long does one container last?" is that you can easily do a large kitchen full of cabinets and only use half of one tin. You can easily do all your baseboards in your house with one tin. If you are using this for all of your wood furniture in your house for occassional polishing, you might need one container annually. Thus, this is an absolutely wonderful value compared to vegetable oil based polishes, which require substantially more applications and amount over time. Below you can see the results of our oak cabinet polishing (notice the flash is bouncing off of the left cabinet and it is still dull, but the flash doesn't even hit the right cabinet and it is glossy from the polish - it looks like new):
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Daddy Van's is on a mission to create superior products that are non-toxic, safe, and healthful for people and the planet, using ingredients that are as close to nature as possible and that are sourced responsibly and ethically. The beeswax comes from Texas and Colorado beekeepers and is unrefined, meaning that the only processing it goes through is filtering out the debris from the hive (read: no commerical contamination concerns of byproducts from manufacturing). It is then packaged up in Evergreen, Colorado and shipped to customers. That's right, this is a Made in the USA product!
Daddy Van's is a member of the Natural Products Association and has been awarded the Green America Business Seal of Approval. Their products are certified cruelty free by Leaping Bunny and a portion of their profits are donated to Healthy Child Healthy World.
