Bespoke Stairs & CNC Panels
Portglenone

Portglenone sits on the County Antrim bank of the Bann, reached from the workshop side by crossing the river at the village bridge. It is a short run and an easy one, and the bridge is the only feature of it worth mentioning: it is a single crossing point, so on the rare occasion it is closed the alternative is a considerable detour either north to Kilrea or south to Toome. That is not a reason to plan differently, but on a job with a hard installation date it is the kind of thing worth knowing exists rather than discovering on the morning. On a stair that matters more than on anything else made here, because a stair is unforgiving of a late change and there is rarely slack in the programme by the time parts are due.

The work itself follows the town. Portglenone has a rural trade base of joiners, agricultural contractors and small manufacturers on both banks of the river, with a good deal of domestic renovation work in the surrounding countryside, so an order arriving from here is more often a one-off or a short run than a rolling production schedule. Stair and panel work tends to arrive through fit-out contractors and joiners rather than direct, so the local contractor base is what really determines the flow of this work.

Building stock is the other thing worth raising early. Around the Bann bridge, Main Street you are mostly looking at the older village street and the buildings near the river crossing. Further out there is modern housing on the edges of the village and agricultural and light industrial buildings in the surrounding townlands. Work of this kind out there is normally a straightforward measure and machine job. Portglenone has relatively little protected fabric in the middle of it, so most work here is a straightforward measure and machine job, with the riverside buildings being the exception worth a check. For a stair or a panelled interior this is the single most important thing to settle first, because a consent condition can change the design itself and not just the timetable.

None of this changes the price of a cut. MDF, birch plywood, poplar plywood, Valchromat, acrylic, HDPE, PVC and decorative furniture board all come through the same regional suppliers whichever town the parts are going to, so lead time is driven by board availability and machine time rather than by which road the delivery takes. Structural stair components and decorative panels have genuinely different material requirements, so the specification should separate them rather than treat the whole job as one order.