A wall that measures three metres at the floor measures three metres and nineteen millimetres at shoulder height. Everything we build allows for it.
The first thing an apprentice here learns is to measure a wall three times and expect three answers. It is not a complaint about builders. Block and render put up by hand over a few weeks in this climate simply does not produce a flat plumb surface, and any workshop that works as though it does produces furniture with gaps in it.
Some real numbers from surveys in the last year. A kitchen wall in Malé that measured three thousand one hundred and four millimetres at the floor, three thousand one hundred and nineteen at worktop height and three thousand and ninety six at the ceiling. A bedroom where the two side walls were out of parallel by twenty two millimetres over three metres. A door frame out of plumb by eleven millimetres over two metres, in a house that is otherwise perfectly sound and has been lived in for thirty years.
Those numbers are why fitted furniture is a different thing from furniture. Everything we build has the tolerance designed into it in three ways.
Scribes. Any run that finishes against a wall ends in a filler piece made oversize and cut on site to follow the wall. A unit made to the exact measured width leaves a tapering gap, and filling that gap afterwards with sealant is how you can tell at a glance that somebody did not plan for it.
Shadow gaps. A wardrobe that runs to the ceiling gets a deliberate gap with a separate cover strip rather than being made to touch, because a ceiling is never level either and a piece made to touch will touch at one end.
Adjustable legs and packing. Every carcass sits on adjustable legs, always, even on a floor that looks flat. A tiled floor in this country varies by five to ten millimetres across a room, and a run of units levelled at one end sits proud of the worktop at the other.
Doors get their own version of this. A frame is packed and shimmed until it is plumb and square in itself, regardless of the opening, because a door hung in an out of plumb frame will swing open or closed on its own and no amount of adjusting the hinges fixes it.
What all of this means for you as a customer is mainly one thing. When somebody quotes you fitted furniture from a set of numbers you sent them, they are not planning any of it. Ask them what they will do about the wall.
