How much would a carpenter charge for a media wall?
A carpenter charges by the day, and on a media wall that day rate buys one trade of four and no materials. Our own price sheet puts the joinery at £400 to £800 for open shelves, £1,200 to £2,000 for doored cabinetry and £2,000 to £3,500 for a library run. A complete build is £3,500 to £7,000.
What a carpenter's day rate actually buys
A day rate buys one person for one day. Materials sit outside it, invoiced at cost or with a margin added. Wiring, plastering, painting and the fire itself sit outside it too. It is a price for cutting and fixing timber, and a media wall is only partly a timber job.
The carpentry on our own price sheet is easy to pick out, because we publish it line by line. Open shelving either side of the recess adds £400 to £800. Doored cabinetry with drawers adds £1,200 to £2,000. A floor-to-ceiling library run adds £2,000 to £3,500. A slatted oak feature panel around the recess adds £400 to £800, and a larger screen wants reinforced ply behind the mount, a further £100 to £200. Each of those numbers already contains the timber, the spray finish and the fitting. A carpenter quoting you a day rate is pricing the fitting on its own.
Where the hours go on a media wall
Our completed London builds run from seven days to fourteen, with borough averages of nine to twelve. The opening two days are framing and first-fix wiring threaded through the framework before anything closes it up. Two more go on boarding, taping and skimming. Then the fire, the screen mount and the joinery. The closing stretch is paint, lighting commissioning and dressing every cable run out of sight. Carpentry accounts for maybe half of that.
Hold a day rate against the real duration and the sum stops looking cheap. Nine to twelve days is the honest span, and we put two people on it rather than one, so eighteen to twenty-four person-days go into a wall before anybody buys a sheet of plasterboard. A complete Dulwich build starts at £4,800 on our quotes and averages nine days on site. Work out what four separate trades charge across that many days, each with its own travel and its own first day billed in full, and the day-rate route rarely lands lower.
What a carpenter's quote will not contain
The electrics are the omission that matters. A media wall wants a socket inside the recess, a switched supply for the fire and a transformer feeding the LED strip. That is fixed wiring in a dwelling, so Part P of the Building Regulations applies and the installation gets certified to BS 7671, the 18th Edition. Where a new circuit has to be run back to the consumer unit, building control has to be told as well. Only a registered electrician issues that certificate. Ours is NICEIC-approved and on the team rather than booked in, and the certificate is what a mortgage lender or a solicitor wants to see at sale. Book your own electrician and you are paying a second day rate, a second visit, and timing first fix to the hour so it lands before the boards go on.
Then the parts that are nobody's labour. The fire is a purchase rather than a trade: budget LED panoramic units are around £400, an SLE140 from Solution Fires is £450 to £900, and a Dimplex Optimyst running a water-vapour flame is £700 to £1,500. Plaster and paint are two more trades with two more day rates. A live gas supply at the old fireplace has to be capped by a Gas Safe registered engineer before a framework goes over it, £150 to £250, invoiced apart from the build because the registration is not ours. Where the flue above is still working, Part J wants a ventilation gap left behind the framing. A statutorily listed house needs Listed Building Consent before work touches an original feature, £200 to £400.
From our London projects
Take the East Dulwich build off Lordship Lane. Three-bed Victorian terrace from the 1890s, slatted honey oak wrapping a 65-inch recess, a Solution Fires SLE140, Down Pipe alcove cabinetry, original cornicing restored. Final price £5,200, nine days on site, two people working it. That is eighteen person-days at under £300 each, and that figure swallows every material, the fire, the plaster, the paint and the certificate. A London carpenter's day rate buys none of those things.
The pattern holds across the 128 builds logged on our five borough pages. Clapham terraces in SW4 average ten days and land between £4,500 and £5,500. Dulwich averages nine days at £4,800 to £5,800. The smallest of the published builds, a loft-suite wall in Abbeville Village, came to £4,100 over seven days. At the other end, wall-to-wall slatted oak on the Bedford Hill borders was £6,800 over twelve. Every one of those is a fixed price agreed after a site visit, with no clock running.
More on the full tier breakdown from £3,500 to £7,000, or price your own specification in thirty seconds, or completed Dulwich builds with their final prices. You can also generate a free design mockup for your own room, or head back to the Media Wall Installers London homepage.
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