I do have an actual office, but despite the leopard print carpet and tiger rug, it’s not a place where I spend a ton of time: I dart in and out to use the printer, but spend the bulk of my workday camped out at our dining room table. Since it’s theoretically a communal space (even though we eat sitting on the floor around the coffee table like cavepeople) I try to keep things as neat as possible…but one thing you’ll always find next to my computer is a coffee cup in the process of making a ring on the wood. Because I need coffee now and extra steps like locating coasters just get in the way.
This has resulted in the area on our dining room table directly surrounding my computer being covered with rings, to the point where there are so many that they’ve basically become a part of the tabletop decor. Honestly, I don’t really care all that much: the table is supposed to look “rustic” to start with, and my feeling about furniture is that you shouldn’t be too precious about it; it should fit with your life, and my life involves coffee and laziness about coasters.
As an example of when not to be (too) precious about furniture: Virgil is destroying our new couch. His favorite place to sit is smack on top of the back pillow, and the fact that he sits there for an average of ten hours every day staring longingly out the window at chipmunks is creating a very large, seemingly permanent dent. I really wish this wasn’t happening, but what am I going to do? I get it: I like chipmunks, too.
That said…the rings on our dining room table are getting a little out of control.
Last night I was reading a book in which the main character uses a stick of butter to get a ring out of her husband’s coffee table. It’s a trick that the character says she learned from her grandmother, and I love tricks that you get from grandmothers. They always work.
So I tried it.
The point, as I gather, is replacing the oil in the wood, so any oil (lemon oil would smell nice, as a bonus) would theoretically work.
This wasn’t part of the “grandma method” described in the book, but I thought a good next step would be to lightly buff the worst rings with the rough side of a new sponge.
Not bad! Not perfect – the table could obviously use another refinishing (as shown in this Jordan In The House segment) – but as a quick fix for an unwanted ring on a beloved table…not bad at all.
