Client Gave Me $16,000, Then Changed His Mind

This is the story of a $10,000 table that I didn't want to build, but my

client

never knew about it and the only way to find out is if you watch this video, because you can probably guess that what I have here is a bunch of skis. provided by the customer who asked me to pour clar epoxy on it and turn it into a coffee table, but that is not actually the table he paid me for when this customer first approached me over 3 years ago and said He is in the process of building a new cabin. in Colorado and I wanted a quote for a really big dining room table and I said, "Okay, I like big dining tables, what are you thinking?" 9 feet 10 feet, maybe 12 feet long and he says , yes, close, what I need is a single slab black walnut table. that's 16 feet long by 5T wide and I was like, "Okay, yeah, that's a really big dining room table" and he said the house is still a little far away, but he wanted to start on the furniture and he wanted to know what it was. my delivery time. and I'm like, oh, for a table that size, probably 12 to 16 months or so, he's like yeah, that should line up pretty well with the build, how much it's going to cost and I'm fine, doing some research.

I've seen slabs that size before and they can cost up to 20 $22,000. I'm thinking I hope I can get one for 14 or $15,000 so I told him $32,000 for the base and everything except shipping and usually when I have these conversations. with

client

s they go for days, weeks, sometimes even months, and he just says, "Okay, what do you need from me?", and I said, Well, I would need a 50% deposit, so $1,000 and he says brilliant. He sends the invoice and I. Keep in

mind

, I literally just talked to this guy for the first time maybe 15 minutes ago and I thought this guy was really messing with me, but he was fine, so I got his information and sent him a QuickBooks request for $166,000 thinking that "I'll see if he really pays this and within a few seconds I get a notification that the payment was received and I was like, "Okay, this guy is really ready to rock and roll" and he said "wait for me, don't buy the slab yet." I'm still planning the house.

We'll let you know when it's time to start working on the table. I'll continue with that story, but I realized there are probably some people here who want to know what's really going on in this build, so. all. What I've done so far is build a melamine mold and

then

I put all the skis in there the way the client chose. I had that photo in my hand, if you noticed, and that was the photo the client

gave

me. sent showing me. how I wanted each of the skis to be arranged and what I did

then

I traced everything with the pencil so I knew I could go back and line it up exactly in the perfect place and I thought it would look a little awkward if I just put the skis on the bottom of The table also thought it might be a little bad when I run them through a planer because I didn't really want to plan part of the skis, so what I did was I had these little half inch blocks. plywood and those are going to be perfectly fine going through the planer and they're also going to give a little point of separation so all the skis are basically going to be floating there if you've seen any of my previous epoxy table videos, You know?

I almost always work with black epoxy and I wish I could tell you that it's because I'm an artist and I think black looks the best and it's the most elegant and timeless and all that and I believe in that a lot to a certain point, but it's also probably the most forgiving, so it's really nice to work in a dusty environment because if a little speck of dust gets in you'll never see it, unlike this very, very clear table or should I say almost clear table. I'm actually putting a slight blue tint on it and that's for a couple of reasons: one, I think it will look a little better, but two, any epoxy over the years and I mean, between 5, 10 and 20 years a kind of amber tone will develop. a yellowish color, but blue, if it appears on the color chart or color wheel, is like the opposite end of that yellow and will offset the yellowish color, so when it turns yellow, it will actually look light , it's a cool effect and I have some samples that I've tried this on over the years, so I talked to the client and said, "Hey, I'd like to give it a very soft blue tone, what do you think?" and he said he loved it but the problem I was going to mix so much epoxy and get the same shade of blue so I go from bucket to bucket and do Tred to keep the drops constant but I always get an extra drop in a bucket or one less in the other bucket.

So I mixed them all together and now I'm finally ready for the pour. So why am I building a 5 ton long epoxy solid brick table when he paid me for a 16 ton long solid walnut table and about a month after he

gave

it to me? That warehouse came up and said hey, I'm thinking about adding another table to the order, what do you think of this idea? And he basically threw me the skis, an epoxy table and what I didn't tell him is that I absolutely despise making these types of tables are much more difficult than, for example, an 8 foot walnut and black epoxy dining room table, but no.

I want to tell you that when I hire someone the last thing I want to hear from them is how difficult the job is. because yeah, that's why I'm hiring you to do it, because I don't want to do it, so I didn't tell them how hard it was, but I also didn't want to raise the price because I wanted it. To think you could come to me for all your future tables because I like to build large dining tables. You're probably going to need a coffee table, maybe you're going to need countertops, and I want you to be able to come to me even though this particular table isn't it.

It's not one I really want to build, so I gave it a quote of $10,000. I know it's a lot of money, but normally I would quote someone a lot more for this type of table, but again I wanted them to think they could come to me. For all future orders I don't want anyone to lose track of what I'm really doing here, so I prepared that epoxy. I made sure to use fans if you don't know epoxy gets hot and when you pour a lot of epoxy like this. It's very hot, so if I hadn't used fans, this epoxy would almost certainly have overheated and cracked and you would have had a very bad time and if you didn't know better, you would like more tips and tricks on construction. an epoxy table, whether building a solid epoxy brick like this or a Live Edge and a more traditional epoxy table.

I have a virtual workshop on epoxy tables and we follow absolutely all the steps to build an epoxy table in your home workshop or garage. Why do you need it? to use fans the types of finish to get a crystal clear finish versus a more opaque or natural type of finish that you may want to use on wood is over 3 hours of content that I still review every week and answer all the questions people ask I is what I'm saying, I don't guarantee success, but you can skip the learning curve, you basically skip the first two years of building an epoxy table, so if you want more information on that, there is a link in the description.

I know what you're doing. thinking the guy just wanted to add the ski table to the order, he never said anything about canceling the Big Walnut table, so what about the Big Walnut table? Approximately every six months we kept in touch. I communicated and asked how the construction was going and I don't think it went very well. I got the sense that they were mostly allowing themselves problems or issues with the county or the government, type issues where the house just wasn't being built to the best of my knowledge anyway and he never said anything about asking to get his money back, he never asked for any of it back, he was just a great client to work with and after about 3 and a half years I think he got tired of it and said "hey." I'm just going to take that ski table we talked about, but this put me in a difficult situation and I'll explain more in just a second, if you haven't understood what I'm going to do.

We'll be going back and forth from that story to the actual construction of this table so that people who want to see how this table is built can know how to do it themselves and people who are more interested in the story can follow along as well. so I'm going to stop giving that warning every time I switch back and forth now, but what I'm doing here is I'm using a flush cut bit to get a tight fit against this metal base and even though this base was really very precisely welded, there will always be some variation in my cut using a chain saw or table saw or a little warping of the metal, so what I'm using is that flush cut bit to give the exact contour to the base.

It's just a really clever way of doing things, the big epoxy came out pretty well, there really weren't many bubbles left in the epoxy, but I made a mistake because I should have sealed the ends of the skis with a faster drag epoxy and I even did it. I thought and looked at the skis closely, but they seemed to be some kind of pretty dense fiberglass in the middle, but what happened was there was actually air trapped in those skis and at the end of the curing process those bubbles came out. and I came up to the surface in some spots, so to fix them I drilled them with the Dremel and I'm going back with clear epoxy.

You might think it would be better to use it as a blue dye, but it's almost impossible. getting that very light blue tint so clear will be your best bet if you have a similar problem or are trying to fill in some bubbles or a slight void it's almost always better to use Clear even on a black table so when the customer told me or Less hinted that he no longer needs the large walnut dining table and will simply take this smaller ski table instead. I was in a bit of a difficult situation because this is not a project that I was particularly passionate about and I probably wouldn't have accepted this order if it had come up in 2024 and said I just wanted this cast epoxy table because when I choose a project I need to be able to make a video about him, I need that video to be interesting. and honestly, I don't know how interesting this video will be.

I guess we'll know once it's up, but I wasn't passionate about building this table, but also, this was a great customer, he hadn't bothered me for over 3 years. he gave me a deposit instantly and I wanted to express the same respect to him that he gave me and I also don't know if you remember this in early mid 2020 when I first spoke to this guy things were much cheaper and then inflation could be a factor or should be a factor, but the guy had already given me $166,000, so if I went to him and said, hey, coincidentally now you don't want that big table and that $10,000 table from 3 years ago, that's going to be to be $15,700 I thought it would have been a little shady or even if I said it was 13 or 14,000, whatever the normal rate I would have told someone in 2024, I feel like it would have sounded like a bait and switch and I would probably be I would have been furious if someone did that to me, so I decided to waive any of the inflation related costs and just say yes, I will honor that original $10,000 cost because, again, that guy was a great client that I was with. very easy to work with. all the time and I wanted to extend the same courtesy.

I've built these solid epoxy type tables before and finished them different ways in the past. One of my favorite builds was that it had this kind of solid brick. Blue gradient epoxy and I bent it in the sun. I don't know if you saw it or not, but it was one of my favorite builds and for that one I actually just polished the epoxy. I went from 80 grit to 3000 grit and then polished it with automotive compounds. The problem with epoxy is that I know people hear epoxy and think it's the hardest coating in the world compared to something like this 2K acrylic.

It's actually not that difficult, so if you can, it will be better. I don't cover it with some kind of clear coat and from what I understand these 2K acrylics are some of the hardest coatings you can give so I just had to sand this down to about 400 grit and then hit it with this 2K acrylic and I still I will have to go through the entire polishing process, but in the end it will be a much more durable surface. I wasn't actually spraying the 2K acrylic there. I know I said yes, but technically it was the sanding sealer that was designed to go under this 2K acrylic, but I actually don't fully understand what a sanding sealer does and I don't want to answer a ton of questions because I don't have any answers for those questions, so we'll just pretend it was that top layer of acrylic, but you can see that there were a couple of little pinhole bubbles that were left over from those bubbles that I patched earlier and some people can look at them and call them a feature and they can say yeah, something as well as that cool bubbly treasure chest. that the diver has in the aquariums and I am not one of those.

I don't like the look of the bubbles. I wish they weren't there. I told this customer that there were several risks in making a large epoxy brick like this andone of the risks. I told them it could break and we could lose the skis completely and I told them I won't charge them for the table if I ruin it, but I can't get their skis back either, so don't do it. send me any priceless heirlooms that you must have or may not have ruined and I just explained the risk and that it's not going to be perfect, there will probably be some little micro bubbles and he said he was fine with all that so I know I warned him to the customer and they weren't terrible, but again, if I'm honest, I wish they weren't there if you didn't know that it's almost impossible to get a perfect finish from the start. from the spray gun and I'm not particularly gifted with the spray gun so I was going to have to do a lot of wet sanding but even a high end auto shop when you come out of their paint booth when a car comes out and it has that clear coat they still have than doing this wet sanding and polishing that's really what separates the high-end show cars from the low-end show cars or everything else on cars, there's always a certain degree of orange peel, you see. trying to sand around there and you might also notice some bad audio in the background and that's because my boy Charlie was here and sanding isn't very fun to watch, but you know what's fun to watch take down trees and this actually ?

Isn't it Charlie? This is one of Charlie's guys, but it was kind of a windy day and these are some old Lombardi popper trees that turn out to be the same as the Burl map, which is a very nice kind of wood, but they ended up taking This was quite satisfying and this was all two weeks before we had a massive storm that took down about 15 trees, four giant trees that ended up taking down a bunch of trees on their way down, but it was a fun process watching Charlie do that. and a lot better than watching me sand, it wasn't watching the trees fall, a lot more fun than watching me sand up to 3000 grit, but the polish is actually a little more satisfying because it goes from pretty dull to almost crystalline and this is a polish of three steps I think I'm just showing you the first step here with the wool glove, but I follow the three steps in this 3M system and I'm no expert, but I can usually get things to shine pretty well on the bottom. although Scott actually had a great idea for this, he suggested making a frosted bottom so it wouldn't show through the table, it would almost look like it's on snow, which again is something Scott came up with and I presented the idea to him to the client. and he really liked the idea, so this is how I'm going to achieve the frosted look on the bottom.

I did this frosted effect once years ago. A customer told me that he wanted this type of frosted look in this clear epoxy. and the Redwood table so I played with it a lot years ago and I think I can do the same thing here and what I did was I sanded it down to 320 grit and then I went back with that maroon pad and I tried to sand it as evenly as I could and that was the part difficult, just trying to get a uniform consistency, but I wanted it to look really good for the adhesive that's going to hold this top down.

This is the most stressful part of this build because all the rest could be fixed later but now it's all done and I don't even know if I have enough of this glue. I have a spoiler for you that this doesn't work, it's not going well at all and you might be wondering why. I didn't just solder tabs on this table like I normally do and bolt it on and that's a fair question now that I know what I know, but at the time I didn't want to have any visible bolts and I thought it would be bad to be able to see through that. clear epoxy and have the bolt.

I also hate putting threaded inserts directly into the epoxy. I'm always a little worried about them breaking the epoxy, however, if I were to do this again and I actually do this again. I would do it completely differently, but at this point I don't know and I felt pretty good about myself. It's been about 4 days since I put that adhesive on and I thought the silicone would dry out. Kind of a transparent opaque looking silicone that would really match the bottom of this table and you don't see it at all, it looks terrible, there's just kind of wavy lines, um, and I don't like it and I don't want it to come off.

I bought it that way so the only alternative is to add some tabs to the metal which means polishing off the powder coat, re-soldering it and screwing it on but I think it will look a little better and I really don't want this in the house from another person. house looking like this. I was getting ready to record a video trying to remove this. I didn't know how strong this construction adhesive would be and it just came off, which probably means it wasn't a very good substance to use, but I guess. It's good for this anyway, but get the rest, yeah, that wasn't going to work anyway, well, I guess I'm glad it looked bad, so to make this look good, I need to carefully go over with this chisel plane, try to fillet.

Remove all that clear construction adhesive without scraping the epoxy because I'm going to have to do the same kind of sanded frosted effect again, which shouldn't be too difficult as long as I don't break it up with this chisel brush. and it went pretty well, this wasn't that bad of a process, the metal on the other hand, this was a real problem or at least it wasn't a big problem because this is the guy who built the base, this is Alias ​​and he . He claims that is his real name, however I can't tell you how many times a girl gave me that name at the bar and it turned out it wasn't actually his name but he came to my shop and soldered the tabs together to avoid seeing the bolts.

We were able to put the table there and figure out where exactly each ski was so we could put a stand right under the ski, which I think was a pretty good solution and it was really nice that you came to my shop directly to do this because it's very difficult to cross the city, especially trying to line up all those holes perfectly, so big. Thanks to Alas, I convinced him to start an Instagram page that I will link in the CU description. I didn't even have social media channels. Not at all, but he's trying to run his business, so follow him and watch his work.

Many thanks to Alias. I mentioned earlier that I don't really like drilling into epoxy and especially adding threaded inserts directly into the epoxy is one of the last things I do. I want to do it, but I don't really have a choice here, so what I'm doing is trying very carefully not to puncture the ski and not try to break it, but I'm using an oversized drill bit and what is this? What I'm going to do is this will allow me to add a little bit of epoxy to the threaded insert and therefore the holding power will be on that epoxy, not on the threads, like it would on a wooden table, and as I watch Scott to edit this.

I was like why did I add blue to that epoxy and he was like oh he said at the time that you thought that would mix a little better and I don't remember saying that or even thinking about it but apparently I did and it didn't. It looks bad but I don't think it made any difference and the final step before assembly is to add N3 Nano and if you watch any of my videos you will know that I always add N3 Nano to my parts, this is a product that I offer myself. It's not something anyone will pay me to add.

This is a product that I offer and one of the things I am most proud of is that it will provide a lot of protection against spills, stains and a clear table like this, it is also a repair. surface, so even if you scratch it, you can add another layer of N3 Nano. It makes a big difference with all the delays from having to modify the table base and have it powder coated. I was sure I was going to be late with delivery, but when I told him it was ready to ship, he said great, I won't be in that house in Colorado for 6 weeks and I'll go ahead and wait until then.

I thought, oh, I guess I'm early, but he offered to have it. I sent it to his house in North Dakota and then he would ship it from there to Colorado. I thought it looked like an extra shipment, so I kept it in my tent for those 6 weeks and looked a little uncomfortable in the background. You may have seen some videos but overall it's a build that I'm not too excited to replicate but I'm very happy with the result and he told me he was excited about the look which I also mentioned at the beginning. from the video that this customer would only know a lot of the behind the scenes details of this build if he actually watches this video, so if you are that customer and know who he is and feel like leaving a comment, say what you want and probably send me a email informing me that you left a comment.

I'll pin it as the top comment, so if you're curious if this customer actually watched the video, check out the comments and we'll see that you guys always want to know what. These pieces appear to be in the client's home so I emailed them and asked for a photo in the space and he sent me this so thank you very much. Remember that he is a better client than a photographer.