Stop Cleaning Kitchen Cabinets With Furniture Polish And Use This Simple Solution Instead

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

Covering a good portion of your kitchen walls and storing an equally large percentage of your kitchen essentials, your cabinets are of chief importance for both storage and aesthetics. If your cabinets are looking less than their best, they can drag down the overall appeal of your entire kitchen, creating a dull or dated finish. Luckily, it's easy to fix this — but if you've been addressing this issue with furniture polish, we have a more effective — and cheaper — solution: soapy water.

A good scrub is the no-paint trick to instantly making cabinets look bright and fresh. If you think your cabinets appear a little weathered, try this before thinking you have to plan for a pricey renovation. Even if you haven't been getting the results you want from furniture polish, it might be the fault of the polish and not the state your cabinets are in. Furniture polish contains petroleum solvents, which it waxes the wood with to create a nice shine, but one that soon dulls so you have to clean your cabinets more often to keep up with it. 

Kitchen cabinets can be one of the most frustrating items to clean, but that can be made a cinch with the right solution — and a polish that requires more frequent upkeep isn't the answer. Soapy water efficiently breaks down and removes build-up and dirt, leaving good-as-new, vibrant cabinets without a waxy finish that can fade.

You may be surprised how cheap and easy it is to restore a vibrant finish to your kitchen cabinets, which upgrades your entire kitchen with a new, sleek, neat aesthetic. Everything you need may very well already be in your kitchen, so you don't even have to buy anything else — like furniture polish — and these items promise a thorough clean without any added chemicals. You won't have to do a big cabinet scrub as often as you would with polish.

For example, two pantry staples that degrease kitchen cabinets are baking soda and vinegar — a paste made of these two ingredients plus water stands up to the most stubborn residue. Additionally, leftover citrus fights grease on and in kitchen cabinets when steeped in vinegar. And, of course, you likely already have dish soap on hand. Simply mix a bit with water for an instant strong cleaner that won't risk any damage to your cabinets or make the chore harder. 

If you need to restock your soap supply anyway, Murphy Original Oil Soap is a good choice for cabinets. It's smart to test a small spot, (ideally, inside a cabinet and out of sight) before going all in on your cleaning just to make sure the finish reacts well to the soap. Use a soft rag, and aim to clean your cabinets monthly with touch-ups as needed.