Interior design guides: what a cupboard really costs, and why

Eight plain-English guides for anyone about to spend money on a wardrobe, a kitchen or a TV unit — written beside a tool that computes the cutting list and the quotation for you, free.

Most cupboard buying guides are written by people selling cupboards. These are written beside a costing instrument: a free interior design tool that decomposes a design into every board, every metre of edge banding, every hinge and every litre of adhesive, nests the boards onto real 8×4 sheets and tells you what it wastes. That means the numbers in these guides come from arithmetic you can reproduce, not from a brochure.

Start with cost

If you only read one, read the wardrobe cost guide. It explains why two quotes for "the same" 8-foot cupboard can differ by forty per cent, and what to ask so you can compare them honestly. Together with the cupboard buying guide it is the shortest route from "I want a cupboard" to "I know what I am paying for".

• What a custom wardrobe costs in India — the per-square-foot number, what it hides, and a worked example
• Modular kitchen cost — why the carcass is the cheap half
• TV units, shoe cabinets and study tables — the small jobs that get overcharged

Then materials

Material is the single biggest lever on price, and the one most people are talked out of understanding. Plywood grade alone moves a wardrobe by a fifth. The plywood guide explains BWP against BWR against MR in the terms a carpenter actually uses, and the sheet-size guide explains why an extra fifty millimetres of width can cost you a whole additional sheet.

• BWP vs BWR plywood — and where MDF is genuinely the better answer
• Plywood sheet sizes and wastage — how a cutting list is built

Then the practical questions

Measuring, choosing between sliding and hinged doors, deciding whether to take the carcass to the ceiling. None of these is difficult, and all of them are expensive to get wrong, because a wardrobe is not something you return.

• How to measure for a fitted wardrobe
• The best cupboards: what actually separates them
• Designing a cupboard online, free

Or skip the reading

The configurator itself is free and needs no account. Draw the cupboard, set the plywood grade, and it returns the bill of quantities and the cutting list. Open the design tool and change a dimension to watch the quotation move.