14 Apr Twenty four stages – inside the finishing line
A finished panel arrives on site looking like a single decision. It is closer to two dozen of them. Each piece moves through twenty-four separate stages before it is cleared for packing, and the majority of those stages involve no coating at all.
Preparation dominates the schedule: sanding sequences at progressively finer grades, grain filling where the finish calls for a closed pore, conditioning between coats, and inspection under raking light at points where a defect can still be corrected rather than merely noted.
Where the time actually goes
The finish range runs from open-pore through closed-pore, matte, semi-transparent and high-gloss, and the stage count barely varies between them. What changes is the distribution. A high-gloss panel spends its time in flatting and polishing; an open-pore panel spends the same hours getting the substrate honest enough to show the grain without flattering it.
“Everything visible in a finished surface was decided three stages before the last coat went on.”
