Why we draw the joinery before the plan is signedWhy we draw the joinery before the plan is signed

The plan is a guess until the cabinet is drawn

A plan drawing tells you where the walls are. It does not tell you whether the wall you have just drawn can hold a 600mm-deep run of cabinets and still leave a person room to open the oven. Those two facts arrive at different times on most projects, and the second one arrives on site.

So we draw the joinery first, at 1:20, before anyone signs anything. Not the finish, not the handles — the volumes. Where the tall run sits, how deep it is, what it does at the corner. Half the time that drawing moves a wall by 150mm, and moving a wall on paper is free.

What it catches

Three things, reliably. Door swings that collide with a drawer front. Appliance clearances that were copied from a brochure written for a different model. And the corner — always the corner, where two runs meet and one of them has to lose 90mm to a carcass nobody drew.

A wall is cheap to move in January and expensive to move in June. The joinery drawing is what tells you which month you are in.

It changes the conversation about money

A client looking at a plan is looking at an abstraction, and abstractions do not have prices. A client looking at an elevation of their own kitchen is looking at a thing a joiner can quote. We get a real number six weeks earlier that way, and a real number six weeks early is the difference between choosing where to spend and finding out where you already have.

It also front-loads the disagreements. Everyone would rather argue about a drawing than about a carcass that has already been built.

What it costs us

Roughly a week of studio time we would otherwise spend later, and occasionally the discomfort of telling someone their room is smaller than they thought. We have never regretted the week.