Doors Line Up at Closeout and Move by February
Every door and drawer was aligned at final walk. The building went through its first heating season and now you're rolling a truck on a job whose retention was released.
Wood is the only material on the job that changes dimension after the owner accepts it. A painted wall doesn't move when the humidity drops, while a run of full-overlay doors on a 3/32 reveal does, and it's visible from across the room. The callback comes back to your shop because your product is the only thing in the building anyone can watch move.
The size of it
You send a truck and a finish carpenter across an entire building, on a job that closed and released retention months ago. There's no open job to charge it to, so the cost settles into overhead with no cost code and raises what every future bid has to cover.
Specifications call for the building to be enclosed with HVAC operating and humidity stable before millwork is delivered. Casework warranties are then written to exclude damage from conditions outside the stated temperature and humidity range. Jobs get delivered into buildings that aren't fully conditioned anyway, because the GC won't hold the schedule for a humidity reading. Wood moves through its first seasonal cycle after acceptance, and doors, drawers, and reveals go out of adjustment inside a standard one-year warranty. You're technically excluded and practically on the hook if you want the next job from that GC.
Three moves, in order
Step 03: Overhead calculation
What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be using.
What else costs millwork and casework contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What millwork and casework owners ask
Cabinet doors out of adjustment months after closeout who pays for the callback?
Every door and drawer was aligned at final walk. The building went through its first heating season and now you're rolling a truck on a job whose retention was released.
What does it cost?
You send a truck and a finish carpenter across an entire building, on a job that closed and released retention months ago. There's no open job to charge it to, so the cost settles into overhead with no cost code and raises what every future bid has to cover.
What do I do first?
Ask for temperature and humidity readings in writing before you schedule delivery, and log the answer even on the jobs where you deliver anyway.
What are millwork and casework contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates millwork and casework, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Interiors, which runs 19% gross margin, 13% overhead and 6% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10% net. Those are derived figures, not millwork and casework's own. Read them as the neighbourhood, and read your own job costing as the answer.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 03, overhead calculation. What indirect cost really comes to at your size, and the rate your estimating template should be using. It comes from chapter 3 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, andCONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for millwork and casework contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.