JOSEPH'S ANTIQUE REPAIR

On the recommendation of Jaipur, an Indonesian furniture store just up the street from Joseph's, I brought in four Indonesian teak drawers from an 8-drawer dresser for repair. One drawer pull had come off, so I brought in that drawer plus three others from my 8-drawer dresser that looked like they might soon come apart. I brought in the original drawer pull that had come off and asked for it to be re-installed, and I asked if the pulls on the other three drawers could be strengthened to keep them from falling off as well. Joseph said it would be easy but required pre-payment in full, and no credit cards or checks were accepted. It was a major red flag, but with an infant at home, I had very limited time to get the drawers fixed, so I took the leap based on the recommendation. Mary, his wife, gave me a handwritten receipt for my cash that said, "I got $80 in cash to repair 4 droors (sic)." (Unfortunately, I'm not making this up.) When I came to pick up the drawers, I was shocked to find a completely different drawer pull on the one that needed re-installing. Of course, it did not match any of the other drawer pulls, and it was not even close to the style or quality of the original. When I asked why, Joseph got very defensive, claiming that it was what I had ordered. I calmly asked why I would have given him the original pull if I had actually wanted one drawer to be mismatched with the rest in my dresser. None of the other drawer pulls had been strengthened, either, but it was made clear there was no chance I was going to get my cash back. I then politely asked for the original pull that I'd given him so that I could get the drawers repaired elsewhere, and only then did Joseph finally admit that he couldn't give it back because he had broken it completely, which is why he'd replaced it with the mismatched drawer pull. I then asked why he wasn't honest with me from the beginning, to which he responded, wagging his finger at me, "I knew you were going to be trouble the minute you walked in the door!" Since I hadn't even brought the drawers with me initially when I'd "first walked in the door" to ask if they'd do the work, I took it to mean they knew petite Asian females were obvious troublemakers. His wife chimed in dismissively, "We do EUROPEAN furniture, not THIS! This no good!" I asked why then they had accepted the job anyway, but the cigarette smoke in the studio (I feel sorry for their clients who had upholstered furniture in their shop.) became overwhelming to me at that point, so I left with my drawers in worse shape than when I'd brought them in. I then called the Indonesian furniture store who had been a frequent client of theirs to let them what Joseph really thought of non-European work. I had to pay another $80 at a different furniture repairer to get the job done correctly. Fortunately, that time I got my recommendation from Angie's List.