Last weekend, while vacationing with friends in the mountains, one of the kids in our group accidentally went off the page while drawing…and ended up marking up an old, antique dining table with a black Sharpie. Oops!

Panic set in…as we were staying in our friends’ family vacation home — and the house is filled with custom-made furnishings that have been handed down or collected for years. After scouring the house and trying or reading the labels of every cleaning product — nothing worked or would be unsafe to use on the antique wooden table.

So, how to do remove permanent marker from a finished wood table? A quick Google search gave us a quick answer: use a simple pencil eraser.

And, of course, it worked. We just erased the marks right off without harming the surface at all.

So, if you’re ever faced with the same problem — in addition to using a pencil eraser to remove the permanent marker from the wooden surface, also turn to the Internet for the answer before tearing apart the cabinets and frantically reading every label!