Saturday, October 5, 2013

For those times you live in a rental...

We LOVE the little house we are renting.  LOVE it : )  But there are some quirky things about it, what with being a cottage from the 1920's.  The sponge paint, crazy kitchen floor (I'll have to show you later), and wood EVERYWHERE.  This is totally a personal preference thing, but I tend to only like wood in very, very dark stains, and mostly only on floors.  Anywhere else and it starts to feel too dark and heavy to me.  If I could pick, all wood except the floors would be painted a pretty, fresh, clean, bright white.  So, you can imagine what I would love to do with our front door and all of that wood trim:


Sadly, our landlords won't let us paint (even those sponge paint walls!), so this brings me to my latest theory on quirky houses: You can live with ANYTHING as long as it is bright, sparkling, and perfectly CLEAN.  Scrubbed, shined, polished...whatever it takes to make something not-so-cute at least sparkling and immaculate.  SO.  This little door was my project today.

First, I attacked it with a few round of Murphy's Oil Soap for Wood, and here's how it turned out:


And here is how my cleaning rag turned out:


Ewwwwwwwwwwww.

I don't know if you can even tell a difference between the before and after picture, but in person you can tell that the door is just fresh, clean wood now - no more dust or dirt caked on there.  What I love about the Murphy's Oil Soap too is that it scrubs things clean AND nourishes the wood with oil, which makes the color of the wood a little less dull.

Next, I tackled the hardware.  Here is what it looked like before:


Poor little guy.

I unscrewed the hardware from the door and made it a cleaning paste with vinegar, salt, and flour, just like I did for the hardware on our campaign dresser.  (Sidenote: There's a preview of our kitchen floor!  Can you see it?)


I spread this paste onto the brass hardware and let it sit in the cereal bowl for about an hour.  There must be something REALLY abrasive about the vinegar and salt together, with the flour making it stay put, because after I scrubbed the paste off in the sink...


The hardware was completely transformed into this!


Isn't that so much better?  It's the little things.  If you can't paint it, at least you can go from this:


To this!



1 comment:

  1. This is SO impressive! It looks amazing all clean and sparkly :)

    -Ashley

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