All I wanted — in the short term — was a nice coffee table. I didn’t want bells or whistles or fancy carvings. I started with trying to refinish my current coffee table, which ended in disaster when I realized that I was spending my time (and my Friday night) trying to gently chisel off glued and nailed panels of wood from the sides of the table. You can’t gently chisel that mess. The sanding afterwards would have been painful. Screw that. So bright and early on a Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago, G and I set out to see what Charlotte has to offer in terms of…