How to hire a wardrobe contractor in Dubai without paying twice

Almost every wardrobe complaint I hear in Dubai comes down to the same thing: the owner compared two prices and never compared two specifications. The finish is the last problem on that list. The first ones are the deposit, the drawings and who is responsible for the wall behind the unit.

What a wardrobe contractor is actually responsible for

A wardrobe order is five pieces of work, and disputes start at the seam between two of them.

1. 1. Site measurement, taken after plastering and tiling, recording floor variation, out-of-plumb walls and ceiling drop along the run.
2. 2. Shop drawings and a 3D visual, signed off by you before anything is cut.
3. 3. Manufacture in a workshop: cutting, edgebanding, spraying, curing.
4. 4. Delivery and installation, including levelling, shimming, scribing to the walls and adjusting hardware.
5. 5. Snagging, rectification and a written warranty.

What usually sits outside that scope is more interesting. Stripping out the developer's melamine wardrobe and carting it away, patching and levelling the wall behind it, adding a socket for LED strip lighting, and any change to a sprinkler head or an AC return when a walk-in closet gets formed with new partitions. Joinery firms are rarely licensed electrical contractors. If lighting appears in the quote, ask who pulls the supply and whether the building will permit that trade on site.

The second boundary owners miss is measurement timing. If the contractor measures before skirting and floor tiles are down, the plinth height is a guess, and the gap that appears later gets filled with silicone. Anyone who arrives to measure a room that is still a building site and does not say so is telling you how the rest of the job will go.

Where to look, and how to cut the shortlist down

Three kinds of supplier quote this work in Dubai and they behave differently.

Retail showrooms on Sheikh Zayed Road and in Al Quoz sell a modular system with fixed carcass widths. Delivery is quick because much of it is stock, and the price per metre looks competitive until the modules do not add up to your wall length and filler panels appear at both ends. Fine for a rental unit, weak where the ceiling is 3 metres and the wall is out of square.

Independent joinery workshops in Al Quoz, Al Qusais and Ras Al Khor produce most of the bespoke wardrobes in the city, including work that other companies put their own name on. Their per-metre rate is lower because there is no showroom rent behind it. What you are also buying is their project management, and that is where the weak ones fall over: the panels arrive, the fitter has a different understanding of the drawing, and nobody on site can authorise a decision.

Fit-out contractors carry joinery inside a renovation contract. It costs more per metre, and you get one party responsible for the interface between wardrobe, wall, floor and electrics. That is how we work: the joinery goes to workshops we have used repeatedly, and the coordination stays with our crew rather than landing on you.

Before anyone gets on the shortlist, ask for four things. A valid trade licence showing a carpentry, joinery or fit-out activity, with the licence number printed on the quotation. A company bank account in the same name as that licence. A set of shop drawings from a past job with the client details removed. And the name of the building where they are installing this week, so you can go and look.

Fifteen minutes on a live installation tells you more than an hour in a showroom. Watch whether the fitters level to a laser or to the floor, whether they protect the tiles, and whether anyone is cutting lacquered panels in the flat with a circular saw.

Reading the quote: the linear metre and what sits outside it

Wardrobes are priced per linear metre of run measured along the wall, at a stated height. Two quotes for the same wall can differ by half, and the reason is almost always specification rather than greed.

Across the Dubai market, catalogue melamine on chipboard at 2.4 metres high starts around AED 1,200 to 3,500 per linear metre. Sprayed lacquer on moisture-resistant MDF with branded hardware sits in the AED 4,000 to 7,500 band. Veneer or high-gloss with drawers, lighting and a full internal fit-out runs from AED 8,000 to 12,000 and beyond. A short built-in run in a spare bedroom lands around AED 6,000 all in. A properly finished walk-in closet passes AED 60,000 without any exotic material involved.

Our own bands start at AED 2,500 rather than AED 1,200, because we do not specify chipboard carcasses or unsealed edges in this climate. Which board survives here and which one swells at the plinth is set out in our guide to joinery materials and finishes in Dubai humidity.

Height is the first thing to check on any comparison. A quote written at 2.4 metres and a quote written to a 3-metre ceiling are different products, and the second one carries an upper section, more panels and more alignment work.

Then read what the price does not include. The lines that reappear later, on almost every job:

• Demolition and disposal of the existing wardrobe, commonly a few hundred to AED 2,000 per unit depending on how it was fixed.
• Levelling or replastering the wall behind the run once the old unit comes off.
• Cut-outs for sockets and switches, and any electrical work at all, including the LED driver and sensor.
• Delivery to floor: service lift booking, out-of-hours labour, corridor protection required by the building.
• Filler panels, cornices and scribes to close the gap to a ceiling that is not flat.
• Internal accessories priced per item. Pull-down rails, trouser racks, felt-lined inserts and laundry pull-outs are rarely inside the metre rate.
• The measurement and design fee if you decide not to proceed.

Hardware is where the quiet substitution happens. If a quote says European soft-close hinges without naming Blum, Hettich or a model number, assume a generic mechanism. Ask for the brand and the specific hinge and runner series, then check that the same words appear in the contract.

One honest caveat that costs us work. If the unit is a rental and the existing carcass is sound, replacing doors, adding new internals and fitting decent hardware typically runs at a third to a half of a new build, and no tenant has ever inspected a carcass. Rip-out and replace makes sense when the box itself has failed or the layout is wrong.

The contract, the deposit and the payment schedule

A joinery order is not a fit-out contract, and the payment structure is different because a workshop has to buy board, hardware and finish before it earns anything. A deposit of 40 to 50% on order, after the shop drawings are signed, is normal. Above 50% you are financing the workshop's other jobs, and 100% up front removes every piece of leverage you have.

A schedule that works: 40 to 50% on signed drawings, 30 to 40% on delivery to site with installation complete, and 10 to 20% held until the snag list is closed. Two to four weeks is a reasonable window for that final release. Pay by transfer to the company account that matches the trade licence, never to a personal account, and keep the stamped invoice. How stage payments and retention work on a full renovation contract, which is a larger and slower animal, is covered in our note on contractor payment schedules and retention.

The contract should name the carcass board type and thickness, the front finish and its coat count, the hardware brand and series, every internal accessory with a quantity, the drawing revision number you approved, a delivery date, an installation window, the warranty period with what it covers, and who owns the drawings if you walk away.

Changes after cutting starts are new parts, not adjustments. Get the price and the added days in writing before you approve any of them, because a verbal instruction to move a shelf becomes a line on the final invoice that you cannot argue with.

On delay, ask what happens if the date slips. Most joinery suppliers offer nothing. We carry a daily penalty on our side of the contract, and the scope and dates are locked before work starts, which is set out in how we structure the works. Whatever the answer, get it on paper rather than in a WhatsApp reply.

The programme, the building rules and why access matters

For a single room, the realistic sequence is short. Measurement on day one, drawings and a 3D visual within three to five working days, then your approval, which is where owners quietly lose two weeks. Production runs 10 to 15 working days for melamine and MDF and 15 to 20 for sprayed lacquer, because the finish needs its cure time and rushing it produces a surface that marks under a fingernail within months. Installation takes one to three days per room.

A full apartment set of five or six rooms behaves differently. Production stretches to four to seven weeks from approved drawings and the whole cycle to eight to twelve weeks, because the workshop is batching and the site needs sequencing around other trades.

The building adds its own calendar. Most towers require a works permission or fit-out NOC from the owners association whenever you touch a wall, an electrical point or a common corridor, even for something as ordinary as a wardrobe. The contractor submits a trade licence, insurance, third-party liability cover and workers' passes, and a refundable fit-out deposit commonly in the AED 5,000 to 20,000 range for apartments is held against damage to common areas. In Emaar communities that NOC typically comes back in five to ten working days. A contractor who has never heard of the process is about to lose you a fortnight.

Access dictates the design more often than owners expect. Panel size is limited by the service lift, so a 2.7-metre full-height door that walks into a villa gets broken into extra panels for a tower, with more joints to align. Add the building's permitted working hours, the delivery slot the management allocates, and the corridor protection they demand. Between 15 June and 15 September the midday break rule stops outdoor work from 12:30 to 15:00, which does not affect assembly inside the flat but does affect loading and unloading in the car park.

Handover: the checklist that decides whether you pay the balance

Walk the run with a torch, a tape and a spirit level before you release the final payment. In frequency order, this is what turns up.

• Reveals between doors should be identical along the whole run, normally 3mm. Two millimetres at one door and five at the next means the carcasses are not plumb or nobody adjusted the doors after fitting.
• The top line of the run should read level against the ceiling, not follow the floor.
• Every hinged door should close without catching, with soft-close engaging in the last few centimetres. Sliding doors should run the full travel at even resistance, with anti-jump devices fitted and a bottom track you can actually clean.
• Open every drawer to full extension and load one. Soft-close should be on the bottom drawers too, not only at eye level.
• Check edgebanding at the corners. A visible white glue line on thin banding will lift within two summers.
• Where the unit meets an out-of-plumb wall, the fix is a scribed panel cut to the wall profile. Silicone bridging an 8mm gap is a shortcut that will crack.
• Under raking light, look for colour variation between doors sprayed in the booth and panels touched up on site.
• On the plinth and any panel near a bathroom wall, check the edges are sealed. That is where moisture gets in and swells the board irreversibly.
• LED strips should read as one continuous line without visible dots, at the same colour temperature run to run, with the driver reachable without dismantling anything.

Write the list, date it, name an owner for each item and send it in writing the same day. A snag list with no dates on it is a wish list, and the balance you are holding is the only reason anyone returns.

Warranty, defects and the flags worth walking away from

Written warranty offers in Dubai commonly run to five years on the carcass and structure and two years on hardware. Blum and Hettich stand behind their own mechanisms for longer, but a hardware warranty only helps if the company that installed it is still trading, which is why the trade licence check matters more than the certificate. Our workmanship carries one year, and on joinery most of that year's callbacks are door adjustments after the first full seasonal cycle. Doors that hung perfectly in March catching in August is normal panel movement, and an adjustable hinge fixes it in about ninety seconds.

Report defects in writing with photographs, quote the contract clause and give a date for the visit. Verbal complaints do not create a record, and a record is what you need if the matter ever goes to a claim.

The patterns that predict trouble:

• A deposit above 50%, or a request to pay a personal account.
• One lump sum on the quotation with no per-metre rate, no board type and no hardware brand named.
• No shop drawings, and a measurement taken from a phone photograph.
• A price that drops 30% the moment you hesitate. Something was removed from the specification, and you will find out which part in a year.
• No trade licence number, no office address, and an Instagram account as the only trace of the company.
• A promise to install before drawings are approved.
• A warranty described only in conversation.

Send a floor plan with wall lengths, a photograph of the room and the ceiling height, and any competent contractor can tell you within a day whether your budget matches the finish you have in mind. If the answer is no, better to hear it before the deposit than after the panels are cut.

We quote the same way: room dimensions, wall lengths, a photo of the space and the ceiling height, and we will tell you what is realistic against your budget before anything is priced. Get in touch here.

FAQ

How much does a custom built-in wardrobe cost per running metre in Dubai?

Catalogue melamine on chipboard starts around AED 1,200 to 3,500 per linear metre at 2.4 metres high. Sprayed lacquer on moisture-resistant MDF with Blum or Hettich hardware sits at AED 4,000 to 7,500, and veneer or high-gloss with drawers and lighting runs from AED 8,000 to 12,000 upward. Always check the quoted height, since a 3-metre ceiling adds an upper section and changes the comparison.

Is installation included in the quoted price?

Usually yes for the fitting itself, and usually no for everything around it. Demolition of the old wardrobe, waste removal, wall levelling, socket cut-outs, electrical connection for LED lighting, service lift charges and corridor protection are the lines most often excluded. Ask for the exclusions in writing before comparing two quotes.

How long does the whole process take?

For one room, measurement on day one, drawings within three to five working days, then 10 to 15 working days of production for melamine and MDF or 15 to 20 for lacquer, plus one to three days of installation. A full apartment set of five or six rooms stretches production to four to seven weeks and the total to eight to twelve. The clock starts when you approve the drawings, not when you sign the quote.

Do I need an NOC for built-in wardrobes?

A freestanding unit needs nothing. Once you touch a wall, an electrical point or the common corridors, most towers and communities require a works permission or fit-out NOC from the owners association, with the contractor's trade licence, insurance and workers' passes submitted. Emaar communities typically issue it in five to ten working days, and a refundable fit-out deposit is commonly held against damage to common areas.

What if the contractor misses the deadline?

Only what the contract says will happen. Most joinery suppliers offer no remedy at all, so the practical protections are holding 10 to 20% of the value until snags close and writing a delay clause in before you pay the deposit. We apply a daily penalty on our own side, and any promise of that kind belongs in the signed document rather than in a message thread.