FINISH CARPENTRY · GORSE HOLLOW · THE PIECE-PRICE SHOP, SINCE 2009
The number before the nail. The cope before the coat.
Ninepenny prices finish work the way a lumberyard prices lumber — by the piece, by the foot, written down before the first board is ordered. Coped inside corners, scribed transitions, hardware set to a schedule, and a ledger you can check line by line against the invoice.
First
Asked before anybody measures
Why cope an inside corner instead of mitering it?
A miter puts two end grains face to face, and end grain swells and shrinks with every humid week — so a mitered joint is a gap on a schedule. A cope follows the profile of the adjoining piece with cross-grain bearing on cross-grain, so the joint stays tight through seasons. It costs us eleven minutes a corner. It is the cheapest insurance in the house.
What does “piece-price” actually mean?
Every opening, every foot of run and every door carries a number before we start — casing per opening, crown per foot, doors each, hardware per schedule line. Your estimate is those numbers applied to your rooms; your invoice is the same numbers plus nothing. If we miss on material, that is our miss, not a change order.
Do you finish the wood yourselves?
On stain-grade, yes — pre-finished flat at the shop, three coats hand-rubbed, because finishing a board after it is hung is finishing it in the dark. On paint-grade we install, fill and caulk, and your painter sprays. Both routes are priced inside the ledger, so the number you sign includes the finish either way.
Can I see the ledger before I commit?
It is the first thing we send — the same card that hangs by the shop door in Gorse Hollow. Most customers can put a pencil to their own openings in ten minutes and land within ten percent of our measure. We are comfortable with that arithmetic.
What if my rooms are not square?
No rooms are square. Floors crown, walls bow, ceilings drift. We scribe rather than force — the base follows the floor, the crown follows the ceiling, and the joint lines stay where the drawing put them. The wall gets to be itself; the trim gets to be straight.
Services
The piece-price ledger
01
Base, casing & crown
Run by the foot, coped at every inside corner, pre-finished or paint-ready. Poplar for paint, white oak and cherry where the grain earns its keep — milled to your profile or matched to the house’s own.
02
Doors & hardware schedules
Hung and latched to a nickel-slide, with a written hardware schedule — hinge finish, backset, knob or lever, per door — agreed before ordering, so nothing arrives in the wrong plating.
03
Stairs, treads & rails
Oak treads, returned risers and skirts scribed to walls that have been drifting since the house was built. Newels bolted through the framing; a rail that takes a full-grown adult at a sprint.
04
Custom millwork & built-ins
Libraries, window seats, mudroom walls and vanities — drawn full-scale, built at the bench in numbered pieces, pre-finished flat and set in a day. Furniture that happens to be part of the room.
How it goes
How a Ninepenny job runs
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
Day 0
The count
Openings counted, conditions photographed, the ledger applied while we stand in the rooms. You leave with a pencil estimate; the fixed version arrives inside two days.
Day 2
The fixed number
Line by line — piece, foot, door, hardware — held for thirty days. Materials carry their own line at cost plus ten, so you can see exactly what the wood costs.
Weeks 1–2
Bench & finish
Stock milled, joints coped, everything pre-finished lying flat in three coats at the shop. Site days stay assembly days — shorter, cleaner, easier to live beside.
Last day
The pencil walkthrough
We hand you the pencil and walk every corner. Anything the pencil can find, we fix before the truck loads — the guarantee is signed on an empty snag list.
Five years on every joint
If a joint we coped opens inside five years, we come back and cut it again — no invoice, no discussion, and the guarantee follows the house when you sell it.
hello@ninepenny.example · 12 Shave Row, Gorse Hollow · Lic. FC-60112
They emailed the rate card before they called back, and my own pencil math landed four percent under their measure. Seventy openings, one invoice, zero surprises — I did not know remodeling could feel like buying lumber.
The hardware schedule sold me before the carpentry did — every hinge and knob listed per door, in the finish we actually chose. Our last crew discovered hardware the day it was installed.
Our stair had been “repaired” twice by the previous owner. Ninepenny pulled it back to the carriage, scribed the skirts to the wall as it is, and it now reads like the original millwork. The inspector took a card.
Client rooms
The ledger, photographed
Six jobs from around Gorse Hollow, shot on walkthrough day with the snag list still in hand. No staging, no grading — the corners are the evidence.
Count your openings. We will price them.
Send the rooms and the era of the house; the ledger does the rest. The measure visit is free and the fixed number arrives inside two days.