Around ten working days is the honest answer for most jobs. Here is where that time actually goes, stage by stage.
Most of my media walls take around ten working days from the first cut to handover. A simple wall can come in under that. A complicated one with deep niches and a specialist finish will take longer. That figure covers a full build: frame, electrics, boarding, plastering, painting, then the TV and fire fitted and tested.
A media wall is not a cabinet you push against a wall. It is a stud frame built into the room, wired inside, boarded, plastered and painted so it reads as part of the house. Several of those stages have to dry or set before the next one can start, and no amount of rushing changes that.
The frame is set out and built to your actual wall, not to a drawing that assumes everything is square. Older houses rarely are. Sloped ceilings, bowed walls and skirting that runs out of level all get dealt with here, because if the frame is wrong everything after it is wrong too.
Power, aerial, HDMI and lighting cable all run inside the frame before anything closes up. This is the stage people underestimate. Once the boards go on, moving a socket means cutting the wall open again, so the position of every outlet is confirmed against your actual equipment first.
Plasterboard goes on and the recesses take shape. This is usually the day the wall stops looking like scaffolding and starts looking like the thing you asked for.
Skim coat, then drying time, then the finish. This is the stage that cannot be compressed. Fresh plaster needs to dry properly before paint goes anywhere near it, and painting too early is the single most common reason a media wall looks patchy six months later.
TV mounted, fire fitted, lighting connected and tested, everything cleaned down and handed over.
One tradesman, no waiting. A lot of the delay on jobs like this is not the work, it is the gaps between trades. I do the carpentry, the boarding, the plastering and the finishing myself, so there is no week lost waiting for someone else to turn up.
Having the TV and fire on site before I start is the biggest one. I can build recesses to published dimensions, but I would rather measure the actual units. Knowing where you want sockets, and whether you want lighting, before the first fix stage also saves a day of back and forth.
I quote a fixed price and a start date after a site visit, and I work on one job at a time. You will not get a frame built and then left for three weeks while I start somebody else. That is deliberate, and it is the reason I cannot take on everything that comes in.
More guides
Why the fire has to be chosen before the frame goes up, and what the clearances really mean.
Read the guide →One is furniture, one is building work. When each is the right answer, including when it is not a media wall.
Read the guide →From £500 per square metre, and why two walls the same size can price very differently.
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