Lock-Up & Fix In Caulfield

Both stages are usually quoted per stage against the floor area rather than as one lump, because they happen months apart and you should be able to budget them separately. Fix-out work involving door hanging and trim is commonly priced around $120 to $250 per door set including the jamb, hardware and architraves, and skirting is priced by the linear metre. Lock-up pricing depends heavily on how many external openings there are and what the cladding is, since a house with twelve windows and Hebel is a different job from one with six and weatherboard. StickBuild Construction gives you a separate itemised figure for each stage before either one starts, and the fix-out number does not move because you changed your mind about door hardware after lock-up.

Lock-up on a standard single-storey home usually takes one to two weeks depending on the number of openings and the cladding system. Fix stage generally runs one to three weeks, because it is slow, precise work and there is far more of it than people expect once you count every door, every metre of skirting and every internal corner. The two stages are separated by whatever the plasterer, tiler and painter need, which is normally several weeks. We give you working-day estimates for both at quote stage and we will tell you honestly if your programme is unrealistic rather than agreeing to it and then missing it.

Running both stages with one carpenter removes the most common source of blame on a residential job, which is a fix-out carpenter inheriting openings and set-outs somebody else got wrong. Umer Sharif has been doing residential and commercial carpentry around Melbourne for over ten years, and StickBuild Construction carries $20 million public liability insurance under ABN 39 276 982 297. We put both stages in writing with dates, and we send you a short end-of-day update so you know what went in without having to drive past. If we are the wrong fit for your job we will say so at the quote rather than take it and stretch.

Lock-up is everything that makes the building weathertight and secure: external doors hung and locking, windows in and flashed, cladding on, and the shell closed up so the building can be locked at the end of the day. Fix, sometimes called second fix or fix-out, is all the internal carpentry that happens after the plaster is on: internal doors and jambs, skirting, architraves, robes, shelving and trim. The gap between them is where the wet trades and the painter work. Knowing which stage your job is at matters because it determines what we need on site, and it is the first thing we will ask you on the phone.

Almost always because something moved after the carpentry went in, and in Melbourne's south-east that usually means reactive clay. Glen Iris, Bentleigh and Malvern East regularly return Class H to Class E site classifications, and soil that swells through a wet winter and shrinks through a dry summer will drop a door frame out of square and open a mitre on an architrave. The other common cause is timber that went in with too much moisture in it and then dried in a heated house. We store trim on site before installing it, leave proper expansion allowances, and fix into solid framing rather than into plaster, which prevents most of it. Where movement is the cause, we can rehang and re-scribe, but we will tell you if it is likely to recur.

Splitting them can work if your builder is running a tight programme and the lock-up carpenter documents their set-outs properly, and it occasionally saves money if you can get a keen price on one stage. In practice, using one carpenter for both means the person hanging your internal doors already knows how the openings were framed and where the noggings went, which removes a whole category of on-site argument. It also means one point of accountability if something is not right. If you already have a lock-up carpenter and just need fix, we are happy to pick it up, and we will inspect the openings before we quote so there are no surprises later.