Fitted Wardrobes in Elphinstone

You end up with a bedroom that has its floor back, because the wardrobe stops being furniture in the room and becomes part of the wall.

George Herkes & Son Joinery has worked across East Lothian since 1989, holds East Lothian Trading Standards Trusted Trader accreditation and is rated 5.0 from 62 reviews, and the joiner in Elphinstone who measures your bedroom is the one who builds and fits the run.

Send George a photo of the bedroom and the rough sizes and he will come and measure it properly.

Bespoke Fitted Wardrobes

What you end up with is a bedroom that has its floor back. The wardrobe stops being furniture in the room and becomes part of the wall, and the space it used to block goes back to the person using it.

Elphinstone bedrooms are mostly one, two and three bedroom stock, and the recurring shape is a chimney breast with a shallow recess either side. A freestanding double blocks either the window or the door swing, and it never fills the alcove it stands beside. A fitted run takes both recesses and the breast between them, so the wall is flat from skirting to cornice and the floor is clear. Nothing stands proud. The room reads bigger because less of it is furniture.

The two recesses are almost never the same depth, because one side of a breast usually carries a flue and the other does not. Matched shop bought units sit proud on one wall and leave a shadow gap on the other, and the eye finds it from the doorway every time. A built run is made to the two depths it actually has, the face frames are made to a single line, and the difference disappears into the carcass where nobody looks. Symmetry ends up being a finish rather than a measurement.

Installation Process and Lead Times for Elphinstone Homes

The disruption people expect is a week of noise. What actually happens is one visit to measure, a stretch of workshop time you never see, and a day or two of fitting.

Survey

The room is measured at three heights and both alcove depths, and the access route is walked from the front door to the bedroom. In the Duries Park streets that route usually includes a stair with a half landing, and a carcass that will not turn it is built in sections instead.

Workshop

Carcasses, doors and drawers are made and sprayed off site. Doors are flatted between coats and stacked to cure. None of that stage happens in your house, which is the whole reason the fitting is short.

Fitting

Floor protection and dust sheets go down before anything is carried in. Carcasses are scribed, packed level and fixed, then doors are hung and adjusted last. The room is usable that evening. The same sequence runs wardrobes designs in Tranent.

Materials, Craftsmanship, and Manufacturing for Elphinstone Homes

Village stock here is mixed in age and mixed in construction, from nineteenth century mining housing through the 1958 and 1970 Duries Park streets to later infill at Waterloo Place and Marchwood Court. Temporary prefabs put up after the war lasted into the 1980s, so a bedroom wall in this village can be almost anything.

Carcasses are eighteen millimetre board, dowelled with glue blocks at the corners. Doors are hand painted MDF where a shaker profile is wanted, because it holds an arris and stays flat, or veneered where the grain matters, with the figure running through the run rather than door by door. Fixings follow the wall: resin anchors in stone, frame fixings in block, screws located into studs where the wall is timber. It is all part of our joinery services. The wall decides the fixing, not the box.

Bedroom, Alcove, and Sloping-Space Solutions

Sloping ceilings and box rooms are where storage is usually given up on, and they are where a fitted run earns the most.

Under a slope, hanging rails go at the high side and drawers under the low side, so the shallow end holds folded clothes rather than nothing. Below about one metre four hundred of headroom a rail is unusable and a drawer bank is not, and that height is where the interior gets decided. In a box room the run goes on the wall opposite the door, full height, with a shallower return beside the window. Eaves cupboards take doors on the flat rather than the slope, because a door hung on a rake will not stay where it is put. The awkward end does the work.

Made-to-Measure Design and Storage Layouts

Most people ask for hanging and then find they needed shelves. The layout is drawn from what actually goes in.

Long hanging for coats and dresses, double hanging for shirts and folded stacks, drawers where the depth allows, and shoe storage at the shallow end where the headroom runs out. Shelf pins are adjustable, since what a wardrobe holds in its first year is rarely what it holds in its fifth. Interior widths are set so a standard hanger clears the stile without catching, which is a dimension people never mention and always notice. The layout follows the contents.

Wardrobe Styles and Finishes

The door is the last decision, and it is the one that ties the run to the house.

A shaker door with the room’s own architrave profile copied into the frame belongs in older village stock. A flat slab door suits the later infill. Sliding doors suit a narrow room where a hinged leaf would foul the bed, at the cost of losing half the opening at any one time. Hinged doors give the full interior and take a deeper handle. Finishes run from hand painted colour to clear lacquered oak, with soft close hinges on both. Ironmongery is chosen for the weight of the leaf rather than the look of the catalogue.

Colour is worth deciding late as well. A hand painted run can be matched to the room’s existing woodwork or set against it deliberately, and either reads better than a colour chosen from a card in a different light. Where a bedroom takes little daylight, a lighter door face and a darker interior keeps the run from closing the room in. That is a five minute conversation at survey and it is one of the few decisions that cannot be changed afterwards without repainting the whole run.

Fitted Wardrobes in Elphinstone: Your Questions Answered