Response from Jax Furniture Refinishing & Upholstering
The table actually looks beautiful. When the customer came to pick it up, two screws in the brackets underneath were installed incorrectly, so the table did not open up correctly. We had had this table completed for a long time before the customer came to pick it up because he was moving into a new home, so we hadn't worked on it for a while and had to refresh ourselves on how it worked. While the customer was here at our shop, we tried to figure out why it wasn't opening up properly, which just made him more upset. We thought maybe the table had "frozen" up from sitting so long, so we were banging on the underside to try to loosen it up with him standing right there, and he really didn't like that at all. He then said the underside of the table looked bad and like it hadn't been done, which is true. The underside of a table top isn't finished like the top, but I guess he didn't realize that. Anyway, once we figured out the issue with the brackets being installed incorrectly, this took us about 5 minutes to fix, but the customer was so irate when he was here at our shop that he had stormed off before we could figure out what the issue was. He tried to negotiate the price down several hundred dollars, but we told him we just needed a few more minutes to figure out what the problem was. He said he didn't have time for that and if it wasn't done after we had had the table for so long, it wasn't up for discussion with him. He told us he doesn't want the table anymore and told us to do whatever we want with it, so we're just going to put it up for sale. The customer was not billed for the work and paid us $0. We think it's probably worth a lot more than $700 and really does look really nice, so we're not sure why he doesn't want it at least to sell it himself, even if he no longer wants it for his new house.