Have you ever found an awesome piece of furniture, only to open up the drawers and find that awful felt lining? I know I have, and it makes you almost not want to buy that piece anymore. It smells, looks awful and is half peeled off.

The reason it was put there in the first place was to keep silver from tarnishing. That’s great and all, when people only used buffets and credenzas in their dining room to store their precious dinnerware.

HOW TO REMOVE FELT FROM WOOD

It’s a real pain the buns for us furniture flippers, but I’m here to share my secrets of how to remove it using 4 simple steps!

The top drawer of my Mint Buffet was lucky enough to have this lovely felt and it was a hot mess:

EW.

So here’s what to do:

STEP ONE:

Peel off any excess felt you can with your hands. You might get lucky and have a lot you can remove this way, or there might not be any.

In my case, as you can see on the back, there are a few loose ends I grabbed and was able to get off. Luckily that middle separator was easy to remove and I didn’t have to worry about working around it.

STEP TWO:

Use a Putty Knife and scrape your little heart out.

This is where you can get in a quick arm work out too 😉 Be sure to get underneath all the loose edges and just scrape away. The faster you scrape, the easier it will come off. Be sure to get in all the corners and get as much of the thicker areas off as you can. Use one of the  pointed ends to really get underneath the felt and then straighten out the knife so it’s flat against the wood and continue to scrape.

STEP THREE:

Use a corner cat sander with course paper (I used 60 grit) to remove the felt that’s really glued down.

This guy works magic and helps to loosen up all those parts that were really stuck. It’s perfect for getting into all those corners too. So, at this point, I went back and forth between my sander and my putty knife for quite a while. This whole process took probably almost an hour and I was sweating profusely :-p

Here’s a progress pic and you can see in the middle is where I used the sander which really got down to the wood again and smoothed everything out.

Since I was painting this drawer and lining it with paper, I wasn’t too concerned with how the wood looked. I just wanted to make sure everything was smooth and I got all the felt off so it wasn’t bumpy.

STEP FOUR:

Vacuum up all those yucky little green dust bunnies.

Trust me, there will be a lot. I would definitely recommend doing this outside. I was out on our porch and still made a HUGE mess.

Here’s what it looked like when I was all done:

I know it looks like there is still quite a bit of felt in there, but it was on there for so long that it stained the wood that lovely green color. I promise, this thing was as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Almost 😉

To finish it off, I just pained over the wood with my Chalky Finish paint from DecoArt and lined it with some pretty paper from Rifle Paper Co.

Can you believe it’s even the same drawer?!

This definitely isn’t a fun thing to have to do and I hope the next time your out thrifting and find that perfect piece, you open the drawers and find nothing but smooth, beautiful wood. But if you don’t, I got ya covered 😉

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Have a fab day everyone!