The question that arrives in every first conversation is how long it will take, and the honest first answer — “somewhere between eight and twenty weeks” — sounds like evasion. It is not. A commission is five distinct stages with very different clocks, and three of them are waiting rather than working: waiting for a client decision, waiting for timber to acclimatise, waiting for a finish to cure. Breaking the schedule into those stages turns a vague number into a set of dates that can be checked off, which is the only version of a timeline worth agreeing to.
Stage one: design and drawings, two to five weeks
This stage is almost entirely governed by how fast decisions come back. A first drawing set typically lands one to two weeks after the site measure. Each revision round adds a week, most of it waiting for an answer. The stage ends when a drawing is signed, and signing it means the species, the hardware, the finish sample and every dimension are settled. Clients who want to keep options open through the build are effectively buying a longer programme; the piece cannot be released to the bench while a door swing is undecided.
Stage two: material, one to six weeks
Common stock in common thicknesses is available immediately. Wide clear boards of a specific species, sequence-matched veneer from one flitch, a particular stone for a top, or hardware from a small maker can all take a month or more. Timber then needs to sit in the shop and come to equilibrium with a similar humidity to its destination, which is two to four weeks for solid stock of any thickness and is the stage most commonly skipped by shops running to a promise. It is also the stage that decides whether the piece survives its first winter.
Stage three: bench work, one to six weeks
Actual fabrication is the most predictable part. A side table is a few days. A dining table with a solid top and a joined base is one to two weeks. A fitted room is three to six weeks of bench time, though it rarely runs consecutively because shops overlap jobs around cure times. The realistic risk here is not the work, it is discovering a defect inside a board after it has been machined, which sends the job back to stage two for that component.
Stages four and five: finishing and installation
Finishing is a week for most schedules and cannot be compressed, because cure time is chemistry rather than effort. A catalysed film needs its coats and its flash times; an oiled piece needs days between applications and should not be wrapped for transport until it has genuinely cured, which is where rushed jobs pick up cloth marks. Installation is a day or two for a freestanding piece, and three to five days for fitted work, scheduled against the building’s programme rather than the shop’s. Promising a date is a commitment in the ordinary commercial sense — the FTC’s rule on shipping within the time promised is a useful reminder that a delivery date given to a customer is not decoration, and a shop that cannot hold a date should be quoting a range instead.
Where the delays actually come from
Ranked by how often they bite: late decisions at drawing stage, a client-supplied item that arrives late or wrong, a site that is not ready on the installation date, material defects discovered in machining, and finishing in a cold shop in January when cure times stretch. Only the last two are inside the maker’s control. The useful protection is a schedule with named checkpoints — drawing signed, material ordered, material acclimatised, assembly complete, finish complete, install window — each with a date, revisited when any one of them slips. A single end date with nothing behind it tells nobody anything until it is missed. Batch size changes these numbers as well, and what moves when a piece is made in a run rather than alone affects lead time as much as it affects cost.
Frequently asked questions
Can a commission be rushed for a deadline? Design and bench stages can sometimes be compressed with overtime. Acclimatisation and finish cure cannot, and shortening them is the most common cause of a piece failing in its first year.
What is a normal deposit structure? Commonly a design fee up front, a material deposit at order, and a balance before or at delivery. What matters is that each payment is tied to a stage that has visibly happened.
Who is liable if the site is not ready on install day? Usually the client, in the sense that storage and a return visit are chargeable. A two-day install window rather than a fixed date removes most of these arguments before they start.