Furniture and joinery

The joinery, from the drawing to the van. Two things decide whether the job makes money. The first is the saw: a panel saw cuts right across whatever is in front of it and cannot stop half way, so a layout that nests parts freely is worthless however good its yield looks — the optimiser here only produces layouts the saw can actually make, draws them, and numbers the cuts in the order the operator makes them. The second is water. Wood moves until it is in balance with the air around it, and a works at forty per cent humidity building for a house at sixty-five is building something that will swell after it is fitted, so every solid part is measured for the movement it will make in millimetres, and a job whose timber nobody has metered will not be signed off. Around those: a bill of materials that goes as deep as it needs to, edge tape taken off the cut size rather than added to the cost, fabric costed against its pattern repeat, and an offcut rack that is only worth having if somebody wrote down where the piece is.