The book runs four to seven weeks out. Scribe days on old houses can usually be squeezed in inside a fortnight — the sequence is fixed, the calendar sometimes bends.
The sequence
Five mornings, in order
The order is the product. Every step exists because the one before it made something possible — skip one and the next two lie about it later.
Scribe
Every wall, sill and ceiling traced and cut to. Nothing gets forced into a gap the house never intended to hold.
Cope
Inside corners coped by hand with a coping saw and a file — a miter is a photograph of a corner; a cope is a promise to it.
Pre-finish
Three coats, hand-rubbed, lying flat at the bench. Finishing hung work is apologizing for the install.
Install
Numbered pieces, one room at a time, mats and plastic down. Assembly, not construction — the hard part already happened.
Walk
Client, carpenter, one raking lamp. The job ends when the lamp finds nothing, and not a minute before.
Services & rates
The 2026 rate card
Published, raised once a year, in daylight. The estimate applies it to your rooms line by line; materials sit on their own line at cost plus ten percent.
Scribe day, old houses$720 / day
Walls traced, transitions cut, one carpenter on site
Interior door, hung & latched$255 ea
Hardware schedule drawn up and priced with you
Opening cased, coped corners$170–290
Casing, base, stool and apron, caulk-ready
Crown, run & coped$12–18 / ft
Up to 10 ft ceilings; spring angles worked out, not guessed
Stain-grade pre-finishingin the price
Three coats hand-rubbed flat — included, never extra
Built-in wall, bench-builtfrom $7,400
Eight feet, drawers on soft-close runners
The sequence keeps score
The sequence is guaranteed
Ten years on every coped joint we cut. If one opens, we run the last three mornings again on our own calendar — scribe, cope, pre-finish, install, walk — and you watch the lamp find nothing twice.
They pre-finished the whole library lying flat at their bench and my house never smelled of oil. The install was one quiet day of numbered pieces clicking together.
Two crews mitered corners in this house before Grainline coped them. Guess whose joints are still closed three winters on. I have had the “photograph vs promise” line explained to me twice and I now repeat it to guests.
The rate card said scribe day was $720 and I begrudged it. Then I watched an hour of a man tracing a 1909 wall and understood I was watching the whole point.
The sequence sounded like a gimmick until the walkthrough, when the carpenter ran a lamp along every coped corner in front of us and the light never caught. My husband asked what we were looking for. “Nothing — that’s the product.”
Before you book
Asked in the shop doorway
Why won’t you install unfinished stain-grade?
Because a finish applied to a hung board misses the back, pools in the profile and sands flat nowhere. Pre-finished flat, three coats, every face — it is one of the five mornings, and skipping it is the difference between furniture and lumber.
Can you match my existing trim?
We keep profile knives for forty-six runs and grind new ones for about $190, yours to keep. The splice lands under a sill; the pattern continues as if the house was never interrupted.
What is a hardware schedule?
A one-page list — per door and per opening — of every hinge, knob, backset and finish, agreed before anything is ordered. It kills the Tuesday-morning “they sent satin instead of oil-rubbed” call. It takes twenty minutes and saves days.
Do you paint?
We install paint-grade ready for your painter — filled, caulked, dusted. Stain-grade we finish entirely ourselves, because that is the third morning and the third morning is not optional.
How small a job will you take?
A scribe day is a real booking: one carpenter, one old room, walls traced and transitions cut. Most of the libraries in the portfolio started as somebody’s scribe day.
One bench, two names on the door
Ada Osei runs the bench; her father checks the copes he still refuses to stop checking. Between them they have never once installed an unfinished stain-grade board, and they will tell you so twice.
bench@grainline.example · 8 Millfold Yard, Vesper Junction · Lic. FC-63701
Recent rooms
Work that survived the lamp
Every tile below ended its job under a raking light that found nothing. That sentence is the whole portfolio.
