Published: 23 April 2025 · Reading time: ~6 minutes · Author: The Braseco Team
A made-to-measure furniture project is not a purchase, it is a collaboration with stages. At each stage you have something to decide, and whatever you postpone in one gets paid for in the next.
It is worth knowing in advance where you are expected to answer, rather than finding out on the day the order should have gone into production.
Most delays do not come from the workshop. They come from postponed decisions.
The first conversation: questions that seem unrelated
The opening questions are not about cupboards. How many of you live there. Who cooks, and how often. Whether you eat at a table or at the counter. Which appliances you are keeping and which you are buying new. Whether there are small children or pets.
The dimensions come out of those answers. A kitchen for two people who cook daily looks different from one for a family who order in three times a week, even if the room is identical.
Measuring
Done on site, not from the developer’s plan. Wall angles, floor level, socket and pipe positions, which way the doors swing.
Ideally, by the time of measuring it is clear which appliances are going in, with their exact dimensions. An oven chosen after the design stage means a unit rebuilt.
The drawing and the revisions
You receive a drawing of everything that will be made. It is worth reading not as a picture but as a list of decisions: where each drawer is, which way each door opens, what goes into each unit.
Revisions are normal at this stage and cost nothing but time. The same changes requested after the panels have been cut cost material.
One exercise catches a lot of oversights: walk mentally through an ordinary morning. Where you take the coffee from, where the mug goes, where the bin is, which hand opens the fridge. If something collides in your head, it will collide in reality.
The point where the order locks
There is a point after which the project goes into production and cannot change without cost: when the materials have been ordered and the panels released for cutting.
Until then, anything undecided holds the project still — the colour of a front, a handle model, whether the dishwasher goes in or not. It is not commercial pressure, it is simply how it works: each of those decisions changes a hole, a dimension, or a material order.
Installation
The room needs to be ready: painting finished, flooring laid, services run to the positions in the drawing. Furniture is installed over the finishes, not the other way round.
On the day, units are aligned, fixed to the wall and the fronts adjusted until the gaps are even. The adjusting takes time and does not show; it is the difference between furniture that is installed and furniture that is merely placed.
After installation
The first few weeks are when the small things appear: a door that has shifted, a drawer wanting a fine adjustment. That is normal and is settled with an adjustment, not an intervention.
A check after a few months is also worth having, once the first heating season has passed, the humidity in the house has changed and the materials have moved.
If you want to see these stages carried through, they are gathered on the projects page. And if you already have a room and an idea, the conversation starts most easily here.