Dazzled by the barely noticable

Over the weekend I moved from my home of 5 years on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to a pretty little corner of Elmhurst. Touching everything I own, making decisions about what to keep and what to donate/sell/recycle has left me exhausted. I'm now on the flip side making decisions with my boyfriend about where my things will go, other ways to organize the kitchen and bedroom and just about everything in between which is equally exhausting but a lot of fun :)

As part of the moving process, I noticed that some of my pine furniture was looking a little drab and for want of a better word, dry. So I looked up a recipe for DIY beeswax furniture polish (because why yes, I did bring my pound of beeswax with me over the Ed Koch Bridge), found an old rag hiding out under the kitchen sink and went to town on my old bookcase.

This surprisingly sturdy, well made Ikea solid pine bookcase has been in my possession since 2003, bought from Craigslist not long after I moved here from the UK. It's been my faithful companion ever since living in Hoboken, Astoria, two apartments in Manhattan and now another neighborhood in Queens. It's been a bookshelf, a liquor cabinet, a necklace stand and now...

... After a generous coating of furniture polish and it's positively gleaming and back to corralling all my books. At the top cookbooks, then fiction and non-fiction, with the last two shelves reserved for knitting and crafting books and magazines. I know it might not look like a huge difference in the pictures but it makes me so happy every time I walk past to see how good this guy looks now.