So. Yesterday the first poly I tried on the shelves was a spray-on type… Like spray paint can. But it left these weird cloudy splotches on one side of our shelves:

Apparently, according to the Internet, it’s called blushing and could be caused by numerous things like too cold, too hot, not shaking the can enough, over shaking the can, or possibly an interaction with a previous finish.

I, however, think it was caused by a bad product, because the brush-on poly worked just fine on the other side of the shelves. So tonight we returned the spray can, and I sanded the blush off and applied brush-on poly:

Nothing like doing it twice!