Betty Reed Facebook ad: “bring your kitchen cabinets back to life”

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983914784359658

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Home & Garden

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My husband took a phone call from his brother last Friday afternoon while I was on the kitchen floor crying with a broken cabinet door in my lap. He didn't see me. The phone call was his brother telling him about the new kitchen he and my sister-in-law were having installed. White shaker. Quartz counters. Twenty-three thousand dollars. My husband had spent twelve minutes on a phone call asking practical questions about a kitchen renovation that cost more than our last car. He had spent eight years telling me we couldn't afford to do anything to ours. I had been asking my husband to do something about our kitchen for eight years. He had said no every time. He had said no last month for the eleventh time. I had stopped asking. I want to tell you something about my marriage before I tell you the rest. My husband is not a cruel man. He coaches our son's soccer team. He works fifty hours a week in shipping. He is also a man who has been telling me next year about my kitchen since 2017. The cheapest refinishing quote I ever got was $4,200. I left the email open on my laptop one Saturday so he would see it when he walked past. He read it. He closed the laptop. He said "absolutely not, honey, the car needs tires." I went into the bathroom after he walked away and ran the numbers in my head. We could have done it. Not easily. We would have had to give up the family vacation and pull our daughter's gymnastics for a year and put off the basement carpet for a third summer in a row. But we could have done it. He didn't know I had done that math. I never told him. I closed the email tab when I came back out. I was thirty-six the first time I asked. I am forty-four now. Here is what I have not told my husband. I have known for eight years that our kitchen cabinets are the reason I told his sister we couldn't do Christmas Eve in 2019. The reason my best friend has been to my house twice in seven years. Once was to drop off a casserole when my mother died. The other time was to use the bathroom. I stand in our kitchen at eleven o'clock at night sometimes after he goes upstairs and I run my thumb down the worn spot by the handle on the cabinet next to the sink. The wood is pale there. I know the exact shape of the worn spot. I have known it for years. My husband has never noticed it once. I have been trying to fix it on my own the entire time, with whatever I could buy on a credit card he doesn't check. Pledge in 2018. Murphy's Oil Soap, three different bottles over the years. Howard's Restor-A-Finish from Amazon, fourteen dollars hidden in a Target bag. A bottle of Old English lemon oil my mother-in-law gave me that I used for a year because she was watching. A Rejuvenate kit I bought at Target and applied at 9pm one Wednesday after the kids were asleep. It streaked, and I spent ninety minutes on the kitchen floor trying to wipe it off. The streaks dried into the wood. None of them worked. Some of them made it worse. Every product I tried felt like another piece of evidence that I was the problem. That my husband was right not to spend $4,200 on something I should have been able to handle for forty. I started hiding the credit card statements after that. The afternoon the cabinet door came off the hinge, I was putting away groceries from Aldi. I picked up the door. I sat down on the floor. I did not cry yet. Then my husband came home early from work, and his phone rang, and he sat down at the island three feet from me with his back turned, and he said "yeah, what'd that run you guys?" to his brother, and I sat on the floor with the broken door listening to him take twelve minutes of practical interest in another woman's kitchen. He hung up. He turned around. He saw me. He said, "Oh hey, that came off again? I'll fix it Saturday." He went upstairs to change. I stayed on the floor for ten minutes after he went upstairs. I cried into the broken hinge in my hand because I did not want him to come back down and ask why I was still on the floor. When I heard the shower turn on I got up and finished putting away the groceries and started dinner. He never came back downstairs. I did not sleep that night. The next morning was Saturday. He took the kids to soccer at 8:30. I watched his truck pull out of the driveway and I stood at the kitchen island and I could not be in my own kitchen for one more minute. I walked across the driveway to my neighbor Helen's house at nine in the morning to ask for a cup of sugar. I did not need a cup of sugar. I needed to be in another woman's kitchen for ten minutes or I was going to lose my mind. Helen has lived next door to us since before we moved in. She is sixty-seven. Her husband died of cancer in 2019. Her kids are grown. She waves to me when I'm getting the mail. We have not had a real conversation in three years. I have no idea what made me knock on her door that morning. I knocked. I asked for sugar. She let me into her kitchen. Her kitchen has the same cabinets as mine. Our houses went up in the same development in 1996. The same builder put both kitchens in. Same cabinets, same wood, same year. Her cabinets did not look like mine. They looked alive. Warm. The wood was deep. I ran my thumb down the inside edge of the cabinet by her sink, the same spot I have been touching in my own kitchen at eleven o'clock at night for eight years. Helen's cabinet was smooth and whole. Mine was not. Helen saw me doing it. She did not say anything for a second. Then she said, "That's where I figured it out too." I looked at her. She said, "Sit down, honey. You don't need sugar." We sat at her kitchen table. She poured tea I did not ask for. She told me her mother had taught her about wood when she was nine years old, and her mother's mother had taught her, and somewhere along the way the lesson stopped being passed down because the cleaning aisle filled up with bottles that promised to do what only your mother used to know how to do. None of our mothers ever told us. Then she said, "I haven't told anyone this in a long time. I should have. I've watched women on this street repaint cabinets and replace cabinets and put up with cabinets they hated for thirty years, and I never said anything. My Bill used to say it wasn't my place. I'm telling you because you came over here this morning and I could see what you'd been carrying." She said, "There's oil in the finish. Nobody tells you that. It dries out over the years. The cleaning aisle speeds it up. Heat from the stove speeds it up. After enough years there's nothing left, and the wood looks the way yours looks. Worn around the handles. Cloudy by the sink. Tired all over." She said, "What you're seeing isn't dirt. It's the finish itself, gone. There's nothing on the surface to clean off." She said, "You have to put the oil back. Then a wax over it to keep the oil in. That's it. That's the whole secret. My mother bought it in a jar. I still buy the same one." She got up. Opened a cabinet above her stove. Came back with a jar I had never seen before. Plant oils and beeswax. She set it on the table between us. She said, "Take it. Don't worry about giving it back. Order yourself one when you can." I went home with Helen's jar in a paper grocery bag. My husband took the kids to lunch after soccer. I had two hours. I opened the jar in my kitchen at eleven. It smelled like beeswax and pine. I put a small amount on a clean dish rag and rubbed it into the cabinet next to the sink, going with the grain. The wood drank it. I watched the oil disappear into wood I had spent eight years believing was dead. I waited fifteen minutes. I buffed it. The worn patch by the handle was gone. I did not believe it. I had bought Howard's. I had bought Rejuvenate. Both of those had looked good for the first hour and made me feel stupid a month later. I opened the curtains all the way. I pulled up a photo on my phone from my daughter's eighth birthday last year, where the cabinet by the sink was in the background of the cake picture. I held the phone up to the cabinet and looked at the photo and back at the cabinet and back at the photo. The worn patch in the photo was not on the cabinet in front of me. I sat down on the kitchen floor for the second time in two days. I did not cry yet. I got up. I walked to the back door and I opened it and I stood in the cold January air with no coat on for what was probably a minute and probably felt like ten. I came back inside. I went to the cabinet. I looked at it under the overhead light, then with the curtains, then under the overhead light again. I touched the inside edge with my thumb, the way Helen had touched hers. The grain felt like wood again. I had been wrong about my kitchen for eight years. Then I did every cabinet in the kitchen. Two hours. I was on my hands and knees a lot of that time. The same kitchen floor. By the time my husband's truck pulled into the driveway with the kids at one, the kitchen was a different kitchen. He had been gone four hours. He came in through the back door in his coaching shirt with the kids ahead of him and a Gatorade in his hand. He stopped in the middle of the kitchen. He set the Gatorade 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 have these refinished?" I told him it was a thirty-nine dollar jar from Helen next door. He stood there for a long time. Then he said, "Eight years?" I nodded. He pulled me into him in the kitchen and he held me for what felt like a long time. I cried into his coaching shirt. Helen's jar is below. It's the one her mother bought and her grandmother before her. If your husband has been telling you next year, try this first. One Saturday. Thirty-nine dollars. While he's at soccer practice. He won't know what you did. He'll just know the kitchen looks different. https://getluxgrove.com/pages/kitchen-cabinets-back-to-life

Where the ad sends people

getluxgrove.com

bring your kitchen cabinets back to life

Luxgrove