Diggity said:
Why the hate for stay at home mom's Fife? I can remember when they were just called "moms"!
Eh, not so much hate but that they're the only ones I know who do any of this farmhouse stuff and when they do they go all in. AggieFanatic09 summed it up well, but there's also the part where a pretty good number of them are involved in pyramid-ummm... multilevel marketing things that seem to get pretty life consuming. There's about a 100% correlation between people I know who do either of those things, and staying at home with small children.
Maybe it's craziness brought on from being held hostage for a long period of time; it's a very odd demographic to me.
edit: And yeah you're supposed to wax it. I'm not exactly sure why but I do remember someone complaining about that part. The people I know who did this did not remove the finish beforehand - for the most part their furniture was that sort of wenge finish brown, then the next week it was turquose/white/... The brown is still visible in areas they sanded through and where screws and nails were pounded into things. Also I wasn't joking about the outdoors, that's how someone did their lamps.