Every quarter we write down how long things are actually taking to arrive on the projects we have open in Minneapolis. These are the times we saw on orders placed between June and August, counted from the day an order was confirmed to the day it was on site. They are not promises from a showroom, and they move, which is why this note gets rewritten four times a year.

Upholstery: 10 to 14 weeks

Custom sofas and lounge chairs are the longest wait on most of our lists. Frames are built to order, and a fabric that has to be shipped to the workroom from somewhere else adds two to three weeks on its own. In-stock pieces arrive in two to four weeks, but the choice of sizes and fabrics is narrow, so we only lean on them when a move-in date is fixed.

Custom cabinetry: 8 to 12 weeks

The clock starts when the shop drawings are signed, not when the cabinets are ordered, so a slow round of comments on the shop drawings costs as much time as a slow shop. Painted fronts sit at the long end of the range because the finish needs its own days. Stained white oak is closer to eight weeks this quarter.

Stone: back to normal

Slab selection takes a week or two, and fabrication runs two to three weeks after templating. Templating can only happen once the base cabinets are installed and level, so stone always follows cabinetry on the schedule, never runs beside it.

Lighting and plumbing fixtures

Most fixtures arrive in two to six weeks. A handful of imported faucets and pendants are still quoting twelve weeks or more, and those are the items we flag in the finish schedule so nobody discovers them in week ten.

Appliances: 3 to 8 weeks

Ranges and refrigerators from the main brands are arriving in three to five weeks. Panel-ready and column units are closer to eight, and they need their panels from the cabinet shop before they can be installed, so they are ordered together with the cabinetry.

Wood flooring: 2 to 4 weeks

Prefinished white oak is steady at two to three weeks. Unfinished boards arrive a little later, but they also need a week in the house to acclimate before anyone installs them, which is easy to forget when the schedule gets tight.

What this means for your schedule

We order the long items the week the drawings are approved, and the contractor builds the sequence around the longest one. In practice that means three things:

• Upholstery is ordered first, even though it is the last thing to go into the room.

• Cabinetry shop drawings are reviewed within two days of arriving, because every day there moves the whole schedule.

• Anything quoting over ten weeks gets a second option on the finish schedule, in case the first one slips.

The next update is in December. If a date in your project depends on one of these, ask us and we will check the current order status instead of the average.