Owning your own home

Shhhh, this is going to be my justification for expanding the Milwaukee Fuel collection. If I'm going to build a wardrobe, I'm going to NEED a cordless table saw.

These bespoke wardrobes cost us less than £3.5k (without paint and knobs) last year.
The builders were doing a lot of other stuff for us though and I think they sucked up a bit of an increase in materials cost.

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Add me to the list wanting details of wardrobe man/woman.

Just found his website http://myhousecarpentry.co.uk
He did some floor to ceiling wardrobes in our bedroom a few years ago, similar style to the loft ones and a similar cost but materials were probably a lot less then.
Based in South Norwood, lovely bloke, super tidy and real attention to details.
Only drawback is he is always busy and you'll probably find you'll need to wait a few months for him to fit you in.

Yes. Which is why, after a month of my massive cupboard sitting in pieces I'm yet to work out the best way to fit it.

Uh oh, you'll upset the joiners with that sort of talk!

I know.... sorry joiners. I'd probably fuck it up TBH.

niiiiiiiceeeeeeee

@motman very similar to these below that we had built last year. The guy who did these has a backlog of about 8 months now and is mainly doing bigger house refurbs so he's ignoring me. We paid £3k ish for these. MDF, painted with quite a few drawers, there is also a cheeky slide out draw on the other side of the stairs for shoes.

You certainly got a lot of storage for your buck there. Looks great!
I think we had to wait about 3 months to get a slot in his schedule but the loft was being built in that time so it all worked out from a timing pov in the end.

With a small child it's super useful to have so much. I wish I'd thought about the drawers a bit more though as they are like giant buckets that shit gets lost in.

Planning on exact same style upstairs but maybe different colour doors or something - just getting blanked by joiners who have shown interest so maybe it'll never happen 😅

From a professional perspective I would make a couple of observations about cupboards.

Doors make a big difference. Cutting some mdf, sanding the edges (hopefully) and painting them is completely different to building them with rails/stiles/panels from scratch.

Drawers are expensive and can be very expensive if they are custom sizes in wood. Push to open drawers are especially expensive and time consuming to set up.

Paint finishes vary in durability and quality and this is a big part of the overall cost if it's done well.

In short what I'm seeing with the more reasonable prices attached are wardrobes that are made in the least expensive ways.

just getting blanked by joiners

Been doing some blanking myself lately. Very busy.

(not too busy to post on here of course!)

Meant to share this as well. A developer just sent it to me, we had been discussing the concept for a while :-

https://www.fittingly.co.uk/

I'm not vouching and I've not been further than the home page. I'd be interested to hear if anyone gets a quote from them though.

All quotes received so far have been MDF. Doors either spray painted to order or using pre-finished MDF.

How many linear metres of joinery are you looking to do? A rough figure of £1k a linear metre used to be a ballpark and seems to align with the above examples. No idea on 2022 rates.

https://www.fittingly.co.uk/

Not too bad (supplied in "paintable" finish), relatively.

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Good to know, thanks for sharing.

Pretty good value. @stevo_com are you going to take on for the "team"and order so we all know whether its worth it? K Thanks.

Does that include fitting or just the flat pack parts?

Does that include fitting or just the flat pack parts?

Looks like 'click to add fitting' is unselected in that screencap.

Fitting looks to be about a grand. Which I could do without spending.

I think Sharps initial quote (yeah yeah, I know) was ~£14k for fitted cupboards in our bedroom and that was ~15 years ago.

Fittingly gives: £4847 without fitting, £5865 with. (Sizing: 4400x2850x620).

But it is far from ideal given it has a limited range of options and sizes (individual units are limited to 1200mm wide and 2000mm high). Ideally we'd have a single big space at the top with a bunch of doors and no internal dividers rather than having to cut it up into 1200mm chunks. We've also got a vanity unit in the existing cupboards that we'd like to keep so I'd have to just spec some random "space" and get something in there to fit the sink/etc.

Interesting experiment though.

Played around a bit more with a more sensible layout (needs to fit around an off centre chimney breast and what I had before had an annoying mix of narrow and wide, deep and shallow units) and added what is likely worst case for the number of drawers/shelves.

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No chance could I take a month off work and build something better than paying someone - that’s if I even had all the tools!

edit: ignore me, saw that you've already got Fittingly on the go