How to Fix Furniture with Mayo

Last Friday, we got a bigger dining room table. It’s from Pottery Barn, ya’ll. Remember my love affair with Pottery Barn?

Even though it isn’t new, it’s the only thing in my house from Pottery Barn (and probably always will be), Better yet, all my kids can fit around it with room for company (as long as that company doesn’t have personal space issues), so I kind of love it.

Two days after we hauled that baby into the dining room, I scorched the top. If you follow my Five in Tow Facbebook page, you already heard the confession. Basically, I plunked my red-hot cast-iron Dutch oven smack down on top of that thing, and even though I had hot pads underneath the pot, it didn’t matter.

When I cleared the table after dinner, I saw a huge, ugly white mark right in the middle of the table. I ruined my Pottery Barn table two days after taking possession of it!

This is why we can’t have nice stuff. I am not worthy.

I almost burst into tears right then and there. Then I remembered some old trick involving mayonnaise and wood. Really, that’s all I had. I couldn’t even remember what the mayo was supposed to help with but I grabbed the jar from the fridge and smeared some right on that horrific mark.

It disappeared.

I could not believe it. I can have nice things after all! I can!

In my distress about the table, I did not think to take a picture before smearing on the condiments, but I did post my success to Facebook. I went on there and told you all how to fix furniture with mayo.

That started an interesting question. Some of you had heard of the ol’ mayo trick but had not had such stellar results. You were sad because you could not fix your furniture with mayo.

That got me thinking. I had some ideas of why my table responded so well to the mayonnaise, and it had to do with heat. The spot on my table was still warm when I applied the mayo, and I wondered if that had anything to do with the amazing results.

I decided to do some experimenting.

CAN MAYO REALLY FIX FURNITURE?

It just so happens that I also ruined another piece of furniture a few years ago (see note above about not being able to have nice things). My mother-in-law gave me an antique dresser when we first got married. Technically, she loaned it to me, but I’ve got squatter’s rights on it now.

Besides, there’s the awkward fact that I made a huge watermark on the top of that very dresser because I didn’t realize the fern I had watered completely overflowed. Water pooled up under the pot and sat there grinning until I noticed it later that night.

By then, it was too late.

I didn’t know what to do so I’ve been hiding that awful spot under piles of clothing for the last two years. My husband thinks I’m a slob. Really, I just can’t have nice things (see note above).

Do you think she’d notice something is different about it? I mean, it has been a few years.

It seemed this piece of furniture was prime for a little..experimentation (my husband agrees, especially if experimentation is synonymous with burning). If anything screams, “You’ve got nothing to lose!” it’s this dresser.

First, I smeared mayonnaise all over the watermark and let it sit. I didn’t notice much, if any, difference. Some of the very faint marks looked a little better, but it was negligible.

It was time to test my hypothesis.

SO…I got out my hair dryer. Holy smokes. Check out what happened.

I put the hair-dryer on high, and half-an-hour later, it looked like this:

That’s a two-year-old, nasty watermark, and it almost disappeared! In case you forgot how horrific it looked before, here’s the side-by-side:

I noticed that the darker places were the peaks of the mayo. In other words, the places where the mayo was the thickest turned out the darkest.

So I went gangster with the mayo on that watermark.

Overkill, perhaps?

This time, I heated the wood before I applied the mayonnaise. Then, I smeared it on thick and hit it with more heat. I know you’re thinking, “I don’t have time to blow-dry a dresser.” Neither do I. So, I rigged up this high-tech automatic blow-drying device. Ta-da!

After three rounds, the dresser looks like this:

Now, it’s not perfect, especially since the water damage actually changed the texture of the top of the dresser. But it’s significantly better than it was earlier today. Given the level of damage on this particular piece of furniture, I’d say the mayonnaise did an amazing job! In fact, I could probably get away with putting just one bird on it.

MAYO FOR THE WIN!

I’m pretty convinced. Mayonnaise does an amazing job of restoring furniture damage due to heat, water, or (ahem) neglect.

What does this mean?

We can all have nice things! (Just keep the mayo close by).

Home

In my mind, I live in house that has stood longer than I have, built by hands that lived before my time. The floor creaks and the stairs are warped from generations of feet climbing up and down, softly wearing their reflections into the wood.

Ancient trees reach out arthritic hands to knock on the windows when the winds blow up, and out in the orchard, I can spend hours under gnarled apple trees and watch as the fruit swells fat and ripe. Decades have passed since shovels broke the dirt and turned the soil and sank saplings into the earth as a kind of security for the years to come.

This place, this home I imagine, is a place of generational blessing, where babies are nursed in the same rooms they grow up in, and the same rooms they sleep in when they come back with children of their own. Here, change is never sudden and new is measured in years, not hours or minutes. Each passing season brings a deepening in me—a peaceful settling in, the way a house settles in to the earth until it’s hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.

I long to be home like that, where home is a part of me, like the skin I live in.

But I’ve never had that.

And I never will.

All my life, I have been transplanted just as soon as the roots have started to wriggle deep into the soil. Once a handful of memories are created, they are packed up and moved on to a new place that doesn’t feel like mine, that doesn’t feel like me.

And every single time, I feel like a bit of plankton, floating about in a great big sea, with no idea what part of the blue is up, and what part of the blue is down, and all I want to do is plant myself somewhere for a great long time.

But the waves won’t let me.

It is my calling, and I know it, to be always a stranger, always a sojourner, always longing for a place to return to that does not exist. In a sense, everywhere is home, and nowhere, all at once.

My heart breaks over it sometimes. I want a place of my own, a little corner of the earth to claim and tame, subdue and improve. I want a little kingdom here, and I grieve when I realize that I will not have it, that my children will not have it.

There is no house. There is no land. There are no generational memories to make or keep and no spreading fruit trees by which to mark the seasons. There is no home.

At least, not here.

But on the other side of time and space there is a haven for my homeless heart. “I go to prepare a place for you,” He said, and my heart leaps when I read the words because I am a woman without a place. Those words are a precious promise to someone like me.

Just for a minute, I close my eyes and forget my wanderings, so I can see it. Nestled in among ancient trees is a house built by the Father who desires to be my rest. The staircase is worn smooth by the feet of the One who waits for me, His Bride, to come home, to be home. I think there must be moss on the garden stones and a fire on the hearth and a thousand memories held in by the walls, as if I have been there all along because it was meant for me, all along.

It is home.

All the longings of my earthly shell, every godly dream left unfulfilled, is there perfected and redeemed. Not a single sacrifice or service has gone unnoticed. It is all repaid in glorious abundance and loving detail. Even the waiting breaths, the questioning and tearful prayers, the years of doubts and fears and unrealized dreams—are there restored to me as if none of it was ruined or wasted.

Home. It is a true home from which I can never be uprooted Nothing can steal away the memories I’m storing up there, because all of it, past, present, and future, is built into that place. All of it is part of the story of that place, that home, and I am a piece of it. There will be no good-byes, no pulling away, no awkward beginnings, only—always—belonging.

This hope of heaven, this hope of home, is so glorious that even a small taste of it is better than anything I’ve found on earth. I must believe that if my wanderings leave me longing for heaven and dissatisfied with earth, then let me wander, and let me ache.

For surely, it is better to ache for heaven than to be content with earth.

Surely, it is a gift of God to wander anywhere that leads me closer to home.

The Truck Didn’t Come

We woke up early because it was the day a semi-truck promised to pull down our street, big and bright and beautiful to two boys who still had a week of being four left in their bodies. Semi-trucks are always worth getting up early for, especially if they intend to park right in front of your house, close enough to touch.

The kids scrambled out of bed and stood in the empty living room, noses to glass, waiting.

But the truck didn’t come.

They pulled themselves away from the windows long enough to devour cold cereal from four borrowed bowls and a mug. Then they raced upstairs to put on shorts and t-shirts so they could stand under the hot sun and bake a little on the sidewalk while they waited. Any second now, it would be here.

But the truck didn’t come.

Jeff packed up the folding table and chairs we’d checked out from the military lending closet at Ft. Bliss and filled the minivan full to bursting with the foam mattresses we had been sleeping on all week. The kids followed him to the garage, begging to be allowed to use them to slide on down the stairs just once before he took them back.

“Don’t you have a truck to watch for?” he said as he stumbled out the door. They watched him go and listened for the rumble of eighteen wheels barreling down our street.

But the truck didn’t come.

Lunch came and went and so did every entertaining activity we could think of to do in an empty house. A few discarded Matchbox cars spun idly to a stop on the bare floor, wheels to the sky, mimicking the dead June bugs the boys were collecting in the garage. I bought a necklace I didn’t need online and Jonathan burned pricker bushes with his magnifying glass. Faith read the same book for the fifth time.

But the truck didn’t come.

Long into the afternoon we waited, watching the shadows of the neighbors’ houses stretch out across our lawn like lazy cats.

Suddenly, the shrill call of the phone broke the silence.

“How is the move going?” asked the chipper voice of our moving coordinator. She reeked of happiness, the exclusive kind of happiness that comes from sleeping in one’s own bed the night before.

“Um…they’re not here yet,” came my reply.

“What?”

“They haven’t arrived. Our stuff hasn’t arrived.” I let my mind wander to a thought of my beautiful bed, and sighed.

“Oh. JustasecwhileIchecksomething.” She rushed to hang up the phone and left me listening to the hum of the dead receiver.

The truck was not going to come.

I knew it even before the moving-coordinator-who-got-to-sleep-in-a-real-bed called me back and told me so. I knew it, but I could hardly believe it. It seemed a cruel trick to play on a woman who had been sleeping on 2 inches of foam for days when she wasn’t even camping.

I wanted to cry. How could I get settled without our stuff?

I thought back. Three weeks before, that truck had pulled away from our house, loaded down with all the things we call ours. Everything we owned was neatly packed in cardboard and bubble wrapped and inventoried so we’d half-know what to do with it when it arrived on the other end of a seventeen hundred mile journey to our new home.

Which one of you has my stuff?

I had stood by a window and watched as the crew slowly drained my house of all its possessions. I thought of my new house, which was two-dimensional in my mind, flat like a photograph of a place I had seen but never really been. It was hard to imagine what it would actually be like, and harder to imagine how I would make it feel like I belonged there.

“How do you make a place feel like home?” a friend had asked, but I fumbled at the answer.

“I’m not really sure,” I said.

“Some people like to hang up curtains right away,” she offered, but we looked at my windows, still curtainless after five years in the house, and we both knew that wasn’t my thing.

“I guess I’ll just get unpacked as quickly as I can,” I told her. “I think once all of our stuff arrives and I get unpacked, it will feel like home.”

But the truck hadn’t come.

And all of the things I had counted on to make a house a home where stuck somewhere between Washington and Texas.

Except six.

That night, those six people sat around a rickety card table in an empty house and shared a beautiful meal made by a new friend in honor of what we thought would be our moving-in day. It was a meal the kids declared the best thing they’d ever eaten because my ability to microwave soup and Minute Rice were no match for Mrs. Harvey’s baked spaghetti and homemade bread.

We wrestled the black foam mattresses back up the steps after driving back to the military installation to re-borrow them, and arranged all five kids in the largest room. Sleeping on foam mattresses in a great big room is loads of fun when you are not yet old enough to know that sometimes, you wake up and your back hurts. Giggles erupted down the hallway as Faith recounted our made-up leprechaun stories and Micah declared Paul the winner of his stinky foot contest.

It occurred to me, as I arranged my bones over my borrowed bed, that home is not about the stuff.

It’s about the story. And all the time I had been waiting for our stuff, the story was already being written.

God has opened up a fresh new page and started writing the words He loves to write: “In the beginning…”

It is beautiful to be in the beginning with God, to be nestled into the pages of the story He’s writing for us and to know that we are wanted right where we are. Any other place on this earth would never feel like home now, whether all of our boxes arrived or not, because God is not writing the story anywhere else. He is writing it here.

(With the exception of my bed), none of the stuff really matters. We are here. We are safe. We are together. And we have one grand adventure unfolding right before our eyes.

Home is where the story is written. It is the place where God molds the characters and reveals the plot. It is where His story becomes our history.

This story, so full of the thoughts and intentions of God, will be told around angel fires long after the stuff has crumbled into dust.

The truck didn’t come. But the story is off to a great start.

Finally!