While it can be difficult with a small client and budget (and a son who comes up with rinky-dinky graphics), the best strategy for any design/communication work is to discuss and agree on (and formalise) a "brief" for your work... its strategy, objectives, type of person you want to appeal to and so on.
You agree that all aesthetic (and other) decisions will be taken with this brief in mind. So you can ask, does the son's graphic help achieve the site's objective, or does it add unnecessary clutter? You're looking for the cleanest, most focused implementation of this brief. Everything in the design should work towards it. Anything that detracts from it should be stripped away.
One way to think about it is to ask, "what metaphor will most clearly say what the client wants to say?" With furniture legs you might go for a "craftsman" metaphor/look, with a sort of warm, cosy, wood-shavings and old tools look, with a colour palette like a cosy autumn afternoon in a lovingly cared-for home workshop. You're saying that the proprietor really cares about making well-crafted wooden products.
Not rocket science, but it means that when the client comes up with a graphic that's the wrong colour or doesn't look well-crafted, you can point them to the agreed brief and ask them if it meets it.
-Hugh Todd
(OK, this post was OT, but as a sop to web standards I'll say that the beauty of a web standards approach is that any HTML can be crafted via css to achieve your goal, across a whole site. And if the metaphor changes in a year or two, your CSS can change it to a new one.)
I understand what it is like to work with a client that puts in ideas that don't work so well, its an art to guide them away from the bad input they provide.
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