When I was growing up we had a similar wooden ironing board, except it folded up into a little cabinet in the kitchen. It was covered first by a layer of heavy canvas (duck cloth) that stayed on it all the time. On top of that was a number of layers of old sheets (ones that the edges were good, but the middle was split). As we scorched the top layer it was just pulled off to reveal the next layer until we got down to the canvas. Then it was time to recover with more old sheets which had been saved for that purpose.