Wax On, Wax Off

Last week was a long week. In addition to my missing luggage, work was cray-cray last week. I wasn't even supposed to work on Monday but my boss asked (very nicely) if I could come in. In my work it tends to be better to take Fridays off instead of Mondays, because we have meetings Tues-Thurs that need prepwork, so it wasn't a huge shock to be asked to come in. But still, I never quite caught up on my sleep all week and I was just very busy!

Since I worked the Monday, my boss told me to take Friday off. I felt extremely grateful because I was just feeling drained by Thursday! I decided I was going to be very productive on Friday and finally paint the bathroom (I am not sure why my mind thinks getting up early and painting a bathroom is a good way to relax, but there you go). I had a guest coming over Saturday afternoon who had never seen my place, so I spent Thursday night cleaning to leave Friday free for painting.

Well, I went outside to clean up the balcony and I found this:

That is a candle, turned black, and melted ALL OVER the table and underneath. Good gravy, this has not been my week! I just had to laugh and changed my Friday plans to include restoring the table and cleaning up this mess!

First thing I did was scrape up as much of the wax as possible (I used a metal spatula). It sure didn't want to come up off the top! The chunky parts under the table just snapped off, thankfully.

Then I sanded it down a bit to try and get the thin layer of wax up and off and try to reduce the dark stain left behind. Unfortunately it didn't do too much to help with the stain. But oh well, it is an old table and I am not about to cry over it. If the stain had been on my new floor I may have flipped, but thankfully none of the wax hit the floor!!

I love the difference between the top of the table and the drop-down side. The top is SO faded! I had planned to restain it early this summer, but never got around to it. Better late than never, right? I used the protective glazing paint called Varda that I got from Ikea when I bought the table. According to the instructions, it expired 3 years ago, but it always seems to do a nice job of giving some life back to the wood, so I just ignore that :)

Much better! Not a perfect match, but the top looked much healthier and it is hard to see the difference when the side is down! I then cleaned up a bit (everything is super dirty out here). I trimmed up the peony that had half died, and I brought the succulents indoors because they seem to not be doing very well (the dropping temperatures may be hurting them).

So the bathroom is still waiting to be painted, but at least the balcony is looking good! FYI- I ended up throwing out the lantern and candle. That wax did not feel like budging and Home Sense and Winners always have a billion adorable lanterns in the spring so I shall just buy a new one!