What is Furniture Scratch Repair?

Series Summary

Furniture serves many important, essential functions for people the world over. In the last few thousand years, chairs, beds, desks, and tables have provided places to sit, eat, talk, work, gather, or sleep. Many people will spend more than a third of their lives in, at, or on furniture. It comes as no surprise, then, that humans have a unique relationship with this group of items they spend so much time around. In some ways, furniture has become a reflection of personality. When choosing furniture for their homes or offices, people are known to concentrate on design, giving it equal or greater weight than function and stability. Many people pass furniture items down from one generation to the next, keeping the item as a family heirloom.

So, what do you do when your wood furniture gets a scratch in it? Throw it out? Paint over it? Not anymore! In this free video series, a furniture manufacturer will teach you how to repair wood scratches with step-by-step video instructions, including assessing the scratch divots and gouges, smoothing, applying grain repair, and sealing and sanding the surface. You'll also learn about burn-in balms, applying lacquer, and polishing the repaired furniture. There's no need to worry anymore about little nicks on furniture in your house. With these tips and techniques, you'll keep everything looking brand new!

Video Transcript

"Alright, after all that work, we're putting a finish on a nice panel like this. What we're going to do now is tear it up. So we've got a couple gouges and, try and get this so you can see it, there's a little ding right here. It's dented. It's the kind of thing you might see around your house where you drop a candlestick on your table and you put a little ding in it, but you haven't broken through the color yet. This, obviously, has broken through the color. This is a gouge out. Maybe a nail drug across something and scratched it really bad. So these are two different kind of repairs. This is one that hasn't broken color, and this is one that has. We're going to fix them both here and show you how to do it. This is the initial part of the process and when you get a piece like this, you may be a little bit hairy where the grain stood up and it's kind of, you can feel the fiber sticking up. So we want to take care of that first and cut those out, get rid of them. And we simply take a razor blade knife and cut away any of those fibers that are still sticking up. Okay, now I've got a nice, smooth surface dip down, so now we can take care of it."