wooden coutnertop help?

[ItyBty]

DH and I just bought wooden (oak) countertop from Ikea for our kitchen, and I want to seal/wax them somehow. Everything I find has petroleum stuff in it! Should I just get the stuff from Ikea? Or can I use something else? I would ideally like a natural oil or wax to keep them water resistant and gorgeous. What would I use and where can I get it??

[snanna]

The Ikea stuff is linseed oil, with a drying agent added. It's food-surface-safe. We have used it on our countertops, and it does a very good job (and dries quickly, which is important, as it needs periodic renewal). Very minimal odor. Is it the drying agent you're worried about?

[ItyBty]

No - I would use the Ikea stuff if I'd remembered to buy it while we were there buying the counters. But the Ikea is an hour away and we're planning to install the counters in a day or so and I'd like to be able to use the kitchen asap because we have guests this weekend, so I wanted to protect the counters before we installed them. (I was thinking I'd was all the surfaces, top, bottom and edges pre-installation to help protect my pretty wood counter)

[snanna]

This is so funny-- that was totally my situation when we installed our wood countertops! Except it was my inlaws coming the next day. : I looked in the hardware store for something acceptable but found nothing. (DO NOT use regular boiled linseed oil, it's very toxic). We installed the countertops unsealed, and covered them with cardboard for the interim, until we could finsh them. The packaging for the countertops, naturally, was the perfect thing. The cardboard was not very lovely to look at, but hey, I got people fed!

[staceychev]

We used Tung oil that we bought from Woodcraft. We sanded and then rubbed in a layer, then repeated a couple of times. We figure we'll have to do it every couple of months for the first year or two, then less frequently after that. The surface is beautiful. We decided against the Ikea oil after reading that pure Tung oil was better, and more natural (seriously, not that the Ikea oil is really bad or anything). We did a lot of research online, checking out forums at sites like www.ikeafans.com and www.gardenweb.com and www.oldhouseweb.com.