Have I ever mentioned that ONE of my problems is . . . if I’m not confident about how to clean something, I let my fear of doing it wrong keep me from doing it at all?

No?  Well, it is.  (One of them.)

I love wood furniture, and as long as dusting is all that needs to be done to keep it looking beautiful, I feel pretty good.  But when wood gets dirty, like . . . needs-to-be-cleaned-for-real, I freeze.

So, when I had the opportunity to try out Guardsman Wood Cleaner, I was glad for the chance/motivation to tackle some projects I’d been putting off for a long time.

I know from experience that just scrubbing wood like you do any other surface doesn’t work very well. For example, here’s our high chair:

(Yes, I still have it even though our youngest child turned six last week. That will surely be the subject of another post!)

Anyway, you can see that the finish was scrubbed off along with the peanut butter and pureed peas that my three babies smeared on it.  I didn’t feel that I had much choice on an item like this.  It had to be cleaned using whatever method was most efficient at the moment.

But . . . the resulting damage to the wood is an example of why I put off cleaning other wood pieces that CAN wait.  I’m scared to devalue them.

The photo at the top of the post is of my rocking chair, which was also my mother’s rocking chair.  It is beautiful and has significant sentimental value.

It was also used daily for rocking, feeding and burping three babies.  (The youngest of whom is now six, as I mentioned above.)

I have a vague memory of cleaning it once, but five years later . . . the rocking chair still had a few splatter spots.

The Guardsman instructions say to spray the cleaner onto a clean cloth.  I was surprised that it came out as a foam.  I tried using it both before and after the foam had soaked into the rag, and it seemed to work equally well both ways.

Here’s the rocking chair after I cleaned it with the Guardsman Wood Cleaner:

A closer view:

Before

After

I was pleased with how it worked, though I did have to use a little muscle on some spots.

My favorite thing?  This cleaner didn’t stink!

That’s another one of my big (totally logical) excuses – stinky cleaners.  The can doesn’t say that it’s unscented, but my Bionic Nose (as my husband calls it) didn’t detect any scent, especially nothing worthy of making an excuse to not use it!

A few things about Guardsman:

• Guardsman and design star Tracy Hutson are challenging Americans to rethink traditional furniture cleaning by giving furniture its own beauty routine with their “Stop Cleaning. Start Caring” campaign.
• You can share your favorite furniture story on Guardsman.com and Tracy Hutson will select one lucky winner to receive a personal design session in their home. This includes a $1500 room re-accessorizing and shopping experience, plus a suite of Guardsman products!
• Guardsman is donating $25,000 to Habitat for Humanity to kick off this campaign!

Do you ever put off cleaning jobs because you’re not sure how to do them?

I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour campaign by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Guardsman Furniture Care and received a Guardsman product and a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.

In college, one of my favorite phrases was, “Deny Reality!”

I thoroughly enjoyed living in my little university-bubble, staying up until the wee hours of the morning laughing with friends and sleeping until ten minutes before the start of my first class . . . whether that class started at 8 a.m. or noon.

I chanted my slogan every time someone tried to talk about anything Real World related.  I knew that I was living in a pre-reality state and I intended to enjoy every minute of it.

As an embrace-each-phase-of-life kind of girl, I have worked to face reality head-on as an adult, but my uncanny ability to live in denial is still a struggle.

One thing I have been ignoring for the past few years?  Our home’s shifting foundation.

We live in North Texas, where the soil is cruel to houses on slab foundations.  When we looked at houses in our town, it was pretty much a given that every single one had had foundation repairs, needed foundation repairs, or would one day need foundation repairs.

We’ve lived in this house for almost six years now (I know that because we looked at it the day we brought my now-almost-six-year-old daughter home from the hospital.)  It’s a great house, but we’ve noticed the tell-tale signs of foundation issues in recent years.  Cracks in the walls, doors that won’t shut properly, etc.  Last summer’s drought didn’t help.

I noticed, but I lived in denial.

I was scared.  I knew that foundation repairs don’t come cheap.

Somehow though, consciously living in denial doesn’t really do much to help solve problems.  And the fact that hubby and I have been casually looking up house prices lately and dreaming of having a place with a little more land means that we were in desperate need of a reality check.  We needed to face up to the extent of our foundation problems and get an idea of what would have to be done if we were ever to sell this house, and we needed to know how much that would cost.

We can dream of moving to a little place in the country, but as long as we’re purposefully living in a state of cluelessness about what it would take to make that actually happen, that can’t be anything more than a dream.

Soooo, when the opportunity came up to do a blogger  review of a DFW foundation repair company, I knew we should do it.

Last Thursday, George from Foundation Repair Solutions came to our home to conduct my reality check.

He surveyed the outside of the home first and then used tools to check the variations in elevation levels throughout the house.  Turns out, it wasn’t my imagination last summer when I thought I was walking uphill from our master bathroom to the bedroom door.

Yes, I was nervous.  Yes . . . my over-dramatic self asked him if mine was the worst house he’d ever seen.

Thankfully, he assured me it wasn’t.

But like I said, our foundation problems are real.  Fixing them won’t be cheap.  I knew that this would be the case, but not knowing “for sure”, not knowing exactly what that meant, was more weight on my mind than knowing the actual truth.

Now, we can take a deep breath, make a plan, and tackle the issue. Somehow, that makes me feel much better than the ambiguous “I know it’s bad” feeling down in my soul.

My thoughts on Foundation Repair Solutions? I was very impressed. George was clean-cut, well-spoken, and spent a significant amount of time not only explaining the ultra-detailed-and-thorough graph/drawing/thingy he had created of our home.  He also explained in great detail (complete with his own drawings) what would need to be done to correct the problems.

He also talked to my husband and I about some landscaping that was too close to the house and why that is not good for the foundation.  My husband was particularly thrilled that George recommended we dig up and completely get rid of the red-tipped ?Fotinia? (my mom will know how to spell that word) which has grown to gargantuan size in the front of the house.  He explained that this particular plant/bush/tree/monster sucks a significant amount of moisture out of the ground and away from the foundation.  Since it was so close to the house, that moisture was being drawn away from the foundation.

Who knew?

Well, now I do.  And that’s at least part of the battle, right?

If you’re in the DFW area, I most definitely recommend that you do a reality check and have your foundation inspected. North Texas homeowners that “Like” the Foundation Repair Facebook page can receive a free $50 Visa gift card when they schedule a free in-home assessment in the form that the Facebook tab should direct them to once they click “Like.”  Be sure to follow that link because you will only qualify for the $50 Visa gift card offer if you are listed in the database that records our FB Likes.  If it turns out that someone who schedules the estimate through the promo page needs repair done, FRS will also offer up to a $1,500.00 rebate.

And FRS repair work comes with a lifetime transferrable warranty, which is a total necessity when selling a house in our area!

I will receive the 50$ giftcard for scheduling my in-home assessment through Facebook as well as compensation for the time required to write this post.  The opinions, experiences, monstrous shrubs and shifting foundation . . . . they’re all mine.