When the title of "Bonehead" falls on you

One of my more frequent sayings in my house is "THIS is why I can't have nice things".  My kids'll confirm this.  And that statement is usually directed at them.  Because they carelessly throw stuff around the house, breaking items or putting marks on walls and the like.  Because they don't typically think before they start on a project, like painting their fingernails...on my solid cherry dining room table and spilling the remover and not telling me until I go to remove the table cloth only to find, well, let me just say it wasn't a pretty formal cherry dining room table anymore.  They're old enough now that they SHOULD think through the consequences (or POSSIBLE ONES) of their actions and take all precautions to ensure the consequences don't happen (and most assuredly, not to my stuff).

It was I, however, that recently added to my collection of "no longer nice things" by setting a dish from the microwave on my fairly new table.  And the result of my bonehead move?  A table with a scorched finish:

Nice huh?  THIS is why I can't have nice things.  So today, I decided to flip the table around so that you wouldn't see the scorched varnish right off the bat and I had to move my computer to do so. And I said to myself I said..."Self...maybe you can google it and see if there is some kind of fix out there on the interwebs".  So I did.  Specifically, I googled "how to remove milk white varnish stain from wood".  I figured might as well be as specific as I can, right?  And lo and behold the FIRST website to pop up was titled  "DIY: How to remove white heat stains from wood table"  Feel free to check out the link.  I was a tad skeptical that one would remove heat stains with HEAT, but I figured I had nothing to lose and since there was an additional white stain, but much smaller, I'd do a test run with that and see if it worked.

5 minutes later, voila:

This does not make me a be all know all about removing stains from wood.  I'm sure that such an operation CAN be more damaging than the original stain, as stated on the DIY website, but this was a risk that paid off for me. Is it perfect?  No.  The table isn't perfect either, mostly because of my kids.

Which is why I can't have nice things. ;-)