Adventures In Natural Homemaking: All-Natural Wood Polish

Hello! Perhaps you're like me, getting ready to host a big Thanksgiving dinner in a couple of days. And perhaps you're also like me, being motivated to do a super-good housecleaning because company's coming. 

We own a number of antique wood furniture pieces, so I was busy polishing them to a nice shine yesterday. I suppose there's people who polish their furniture on a regular basis, but I'm not one of them,so I wasn't exactly looking forward to it. 

Nevertheless, even though it's a task I don't do often, I'd rather use something that doesn't list a bunch of chemicals on a bottle. So I decided to try the following "recipe", which I found on the Internet (don't recall the source):

All-Natural Wood Polish

1/4 cup olive oil(see note below)
1/4 cup vinegar(see note below)
10 drops orange essential oil (see note below)

Add all to spray bottle and shake. Spray on cloth and wipe down furniture. 

Notes: no need for the fancier grade (ie extra virgin) of olive oil here; can use the cheaper versions. I assume that the vinegar is meant to be the plain white kind, so that's what I used. 

It seems to me that essential oils are becoming more readily available, perhaps due to an interest in natural cleaning and natural beauty routines. I got my orange essential oil in an online sale (the company has since gone under, I believe), but I've also seen essential oils sold at Meijer (a regional hypermarket chain if you're reading this from outside the Midwest). Health food stores and food coops are other options.

Since I had a lot of furniture to polish, I doubled the "recipe", then began merrily spraying and wiping away. I actually enjoyed watching the woods come back to life, so to speak, and I enjoyed the fact that I didn't need to use a bunch of laboratory-blended "ingredients" to do so. 

Of course, I had to keep shaking the spray bottle to keep the concoction blended, but that was only a minor issue. Other than that, this was a nice wood polish to use. 

Who knows, it might even get me to polish my furniture more often!