What Happens on the Day Your Table Is Delivered and Placed

Buying a solid slab table is not like buying furniture out of a showroom box. It arrives as one piece of wood, usually with a steel base crated separately, and it has to get from a truck at the curb to a spot in your room without being dragged, flexed, or leaned on its edge against a doorframe. I get asked about delivery day more than almost anything else I get asked, and I will tell you plainly: almost none of the trouble I have seen was about the wood. It was about a doorway, a stair turn, or a light fixture nobody measured.

So here is the day, start to finish, the way it actually goes. This applies to any of the live-edge Saman tables I sell, and the same logic carries over to a long top going into an office.

Before the truck: measure the path, not just the room

Everyone measures the room. Almost nobody measures the way in. Walk the route the top will travel, from the curb to its final position, and write down the narrowest point. That is usually not the front door. It is a door that only opens ninety degrees because of a wall behind it, a stair landing where you have to pivot, an elevator that is wide enough but not deep enough for the diagonal, or a hallway with a radiator sticking out at knee height.

Two numbers matter. The first is the top's width, because that is what has to clear a doorway when the slab is carried upright on edge. The second is its length, because that is what governs whether a turn is possible at all. A nine-foot top needs either a straight run or a corner with enough open diagonal to swing through. If you are not sure, measure the diagonal of the turn and compare it honestly to the length. Better to find out on a Tuesday with a tape measure than on delivery day with four people holding a hundred-odd pounds of hardwood.

Then clear the room. Decide where the table lands before anything comes through the door, move the rug and the chairs out, and look up. Low pendants and chandeliers over a dining spot get knocked more often than you would think, and a fixture is cheaper to take down for an hour than to replace.

Two people minimum, usually three

A solid top is heavy and it does not flex the way plywood does. It is carried upright, gripped at the ends, with hands on the squared faces — not hooked under the live edge. The natural edge is the character you paid for and it is also the part most likely to chip if it takes the weight of the whole slab against a doorframe. Nothing gets dragged across its face, and nothing gets set down on bare concrete without a blanket under it.

Gloves, moving blankets, and a clear floor do more for a smooth delivery than muscle does. If there are stairs, put the strongest person at the bottom end, because that is the one carrying the load going up.

The base goes down first

Steel bases get positioned and leveled before the top ever touches them. Put the base roughly where the table will live, check it with a level, and shim the feet if the floor runs off — and most floors do. A slab top will telegraph a racked base. You will feel it as a rock in one corner and then spend a month blaming the wood.

When the top goes on, it is set down, not slid. Fastening is the step people rush. Solid wood expands and contracts across its width with the seasons, so the hardware has to let it. Slotted holes, figure-eight fasteners, or clips that allow lateral movement are what you want across the grain; fixed screws in fixed holes across the full width are what you do not. Snug is enough. Overtightening a top into a rigid steel frame is how you build a stress crack in six months.

What I check before I call it done

Top sits flat with no rock. Base in full contact at every foot. Edges and corners intact, nothing scraped on the way in. Underside clean. Then I stand back and look at it from the doorway, because that is how you will see it every day, and sometimes a table wants to be rotated end for end once you see the figure in the room's light.

Care depends on how the top was finished, and finishes vary from slab to slab, so each listing states its finish. Follow that, not a general rule you read somewhere.

The first week in the room

The slabs are kiln-dried, but wood still responds to the room it lives in. Give it a week before you judge anything. Keep it off a radiator, out of a direct heat register's path, and out of a sunbeam that hits the same stripe every afternoon. Use felt under anything with a hard base, and wipe spills when they happen rather than later. That is the whole maintenance routine for most people.

If something is not right

Call me. I am the one who answers, and I would rather hear about a problem on day one than find out about it in a review six weeks later. If you are still at the planning stage and want me to look at your measurements before you commit to a size, send them over — that conversation takes five minutes and has saved more than a few deliveries.

Norman Jimenez, Platinum Luxury Teak. (773) 584-7334, info@platinumluxuryteak.com, or reach me here.