Luxgrove ad: Betty Reed

A stranger had walked through our house that morning with a clipboard and taken twenty-two thousand dollars off the price of it in eleven minutes. All because of one room. My realtor called me an hour after he left. She said five words. "Talk to me about the kitchen." I knew what she was asking. I knew what the answer was. I couldn't say it. She heard the sink dripping behind me on the phone. She told me to get a plumber there by the end of the week because no photographer was going to re-shoot the kitchen with a dripping tap on the sound. She didn't ask me when the last time was that the sink worked. I think she already knew. I wrote down call a handyman on a sticky note and put it on the fridge next to a sticky note that said $22,000. Then I went into the pantry and I closed the door and I cried. Here is what was actually on the line. We were supposed to be moving to Minnesota in six weeks for my husband's new job. We had already signed on the next house. Our earnest money was in escrow. Every dollar of this sale had to come through at full asking or we were going to lose the other one. We did not have twenty-two thousand dollars. I had eleven days to fix what the man with the clipboard said was wrong with my kitchen. I didn't know what was wrong with my kitchen. That night I did not sleep. I sat at the kitchen island at two in the morning with my laptop and I opened every tab I could think of. I bought three products on the same Amazon order. Howard's Restor-A-Finish. Howard's Feed-N-Wax. A Rejuvenate cabinet kit. Prime delivery, eight hours away. They all came before noon Wednesday. I did the worst cabinet with Howard's first. The smell made my eyes water. It looked marginally better for two days and then the same. I did the cabinet next to it with Feed-N-Wax. It went sticky. I did a third one with Rejuvenate and it streaked within an hour. Thursday I did a whole row with Pledge while I was crying. Under the afternoon sun the Pledge made the worn patches more obvious, not less. I'd made it worse. Friday I remembered a bottle of Old English lemon oil my mother-in-law had given me years ago. I dug it out from under the sink. I smelled like furniture polish for two days and the cabinets still looked the same. I called a cabinet painter Friday afternoon. Earliest start — six weeks out. We were moving in six weeks. I called a refinisher Friday at 4:30. Eleven thousand dollars. Three weeks to complete. I hung up and sat on my kitchen floor and realized I had eight days left, I had tried five products in five days, and every cabinet in my kitchen was now a different shade of slightly wrong. Saturday morning I remembered the plumber. I called the handyman service my realtor had sent me. They sent a guy for Tuesday morning at eight. His name was Dave. I was at the island on my third coffee that Tuesday, scrubbing a cabinet door with a paper towel, when he came through the back door with a toolbox. I hadn't slept more than four hours any night that week. I did not realize I had been crying again until he looked at me. He was under the sink for about forty minutes. When he stood up he washed his hands at the faucet he had just fixed. Then he dried them on a dish towel and stood there watching me scrub. He said, "Ma'am, can I ask what you're doing to those cabinets?" I told him. The whole thing. The man with the clipboard. The twenty-two thousand. The eleven days. The Howard's and the Feed-N-Wax and the Rejuvenate on the same Amazon order. The Pledge I'd cried through. The refinisher who wanted eleven thousand dollars I did not have. The painter who couldn't come for six weeks. He listened. Then he said, "My ma used to do this for people." Dave's mother was named Dorothy. She took care of wood for people in their neighborhood outside Toledo for almost forty years. Not a refinisher. She didn't sand or strip. Dave had watched her work on people's furniture in their garage his whole childhood. She died six years ago, and he still used her stuff on his own cabinets — he said he'd never found anything that worked better. He walked over to the worst one. The one by the sink. He ran his thumb slowly down the inside edge. Then he said — and I am writing this exactly the way he said it — "Ma'am, you didn't damage these. You cleaned them. My ma always said that's what kills wood. All the scrubbing." I asked him what he meant. He closed the cabinet. Tapped the face of the door by the handle where the finish had worn through. "There's oil in the finish. You don't think about it. But it's there. Keeps everything bendy. Over a lot of years it dries out. Heat from the stove and every cleaner you ever used takes more of it out." He paused. I could see him trying to remember how his mother said the rest. "Once the oil's gone, the stuff holding the color gets brittle. Ma used to say it goes — he snapped his fingers — like that. Can't see it but it's happened. That's why the finish wears through where your thumb goes on the handle. Nothing bendy left in it. You ain't wearing it down. It's already gone." He moved to the cabinet by the sink. Pointed at the cloudy patch. "Same thing here. Water gets through where you can't see. Not damage. The finish stopped protecting anything a long time ago. And that tired look all over the kitchen — my ma had a word for it, I forget what she said. But it's the finish itself gone cloudy from the inside. It ain't dirt. Ain't anything you can wipe off." He was quiet for a second. "Ma used to say you have to feed the wood first. Put the oil back. Then beeswax on top to keep it in. One jar. That was her whole kit. She'd been doing this since before I was born, he said." I asked him where to get it. He pulled a paper napkin from the stack on my counter and wrote the name of the jar on it with a pen from his pocket. "Order it today. Do it this weekend. Don't refinish. Not for this." He left around 10am. I ordered it from my phone at 10:07. The fastest shipping they offered was Thursday. Thursday afternoon the package sat on my porch for two hours before I went out to get it because I couldn't decide if I wanted to open it. My husband took the kids to his parents Friday evening. Empty house for the photographer on Monday. I was alone in the kitchen Saturday at seven in the morning with the jar, a stack of clean cloths, and five days left. I opened it. Beeswax and something pine-like. I put a small amount on a cloth and I rubbed it into the door by the sink. The wood drank it. I could see it going in. I waited the fifteen minutes Dave had said. I buffed with a dish rag. Stepped back. It looked different. I had said it looked different about Howard's. I had said it about Rejuvenate. Both of those had lied to me. I tried to leave the kitchen. I went into the living room and I sat on the couch and I could not sit on the couch. I walked upstairs and I lay down on the bed and I could not lie down on the bed. I went back into the kitchen and I stood in front of the cabinet and I stared at it for fifteen more minutes. I opened the curtains all the way. I went out to my car and got the photographer's report off the passenger seat. I pulled up the photo the man with the clipboard had taken of the exact cabinet I had just done. I held the phone up next to the cabinet. The dull patch in his photo was not on the cabinet in front of me. I still didn't trust it. I forced myself upstairs. I tried to read. I read the same paragraph six times. I went back down at eleven that night with my phone flashlight and I checked the cabinet in the dark because I wanted to know if it would look wrong under bad light. It didn't. I didn't sleep. I came down at six Sunday morning in my bathrobe. Twenty-three hours after I'd done the first cabinet. It still looked right. I did every cabinet in the kitchen over the rest of Sunday. Six hours. By Sunday evening the kitchen looked like a different kitchen. My husband and the kids were due home in twenty minutes. He walked in through the back door carrying a grocery bag. He stopped in the middle of the kitchen. He put the bag down on the counter. He walked to the cabinet by the sink. He ran his hand along the face of the door. He said, "Did you do these yourself?" I told him it was a thirty-nine dollar jar and a Saturday. He pulled me into him in the kitchen and neither of us said anything for a long time. The photographer came Monday morning. The listing re-launched Tuesday. We had two offers by Friday. We took the higher one. Eight thousand above our original asking price. We closed thirty-one days later. The new house closed the same day. The jar Dave wrote down for me on the back of a paper napkin is below — I don't make anything by telling you this. If your cabinets look tired, or dull, or worn around the handles, or cloudy by the sink — they're not damaged. The finish is dying. That's all. You don't need to refinish. You don't need to paint. Do one cabinet first. The worst one. So you can see. https://getluxgrove.com/pages/kitchen-cabinets-back-to-life