What homeowners ask a carpenter, and the page each answer belongs on

Eight questions a commission raises, in the order they come

The list follows a commission from the first idea to the year after fitting. The wording in quotation marks is ours, written as an example of how a homeowner might put each question to an AI assistant or send it by email. We have not measured what homeowners type, and the questions your own clients have asked, collected as the next section describes, replace ours.

1. "Can you make a [built-in bookcase] to fit [an alcove under a sloping ceiling]?" The answer says yes or no for that kind of work, the sizes and shapes you take on, and what you do not make.
2. "Which wood would you use for a [kitchen island top]?" The answer names the woods you use for that piece and your reason for each, in your own words.
3. "How long from ordering to fitting?" The answer is your dated range from recent jobs, and where the time goes: drawings, making, fitting.
4. "Roughly what does a [staircase] cost?" The answer is your range for the usual scope, and what moves it.
5. "Can I see your workshop, or samples of the wood and finish?" The answer says whether, when, by appointment or not, and which samples you can show or send.
6. "How does fitting work, and how long will the room be out of use?" The answer gives your fitting days, who comes, and what you ask the household to have ready.
7. "How do I look after a solid wood [tabletop]?" The answer is your own care notes for the finish you applied, and which finish each piece has.
8. "What if a door or drawer needs adjusting later?" The answer is your policy: what you come back for, for how long, and how to ask.

The third and fourth answers come from your own records, and working them out from recent jobs is covered in what a made-to-measure workshop can state. The other six are sentences only you can write, because they describe how your workshop works.

The question log: where to collect, and what to leave out

Look for these questions where your clients have already written them down. Start with the notes from first visits, where questions come before the drawing. Then go through quotes, where a client asks what a line means or why one wood costs more; emails and messages from before and after fitting; and the phone messages someone wrote down. Go back through [the last few months] of them before writing a single answer.

Copy each question into one log with the person taken out. Remove names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and anything that would identify a house, such as a street or a detail of the building no other house has. Keep the question in the client's words, date it, and tag the stage it came at. When the same question arrives again, add a mark to its tally instead of a new line.

date:      [YYYY-MM-DD]
stage:     [before the visit | quote | making | fitting | after fitting]
source:    [first-visit notes | quote | email | phone message]
question:  "[can the island top be one piece of oak]"  (personal details removed)
tally:     [how many times it has been asked]
answered:  [the page that answers it, or "not yet"]

The tally is your own count of your own correspondence. It tells you which answers to write first. It is not a measurement of what anyone types into an assistant, and it should not be described as one.

Which page answers which question

Answer each question on the page a reader would open for it, not on one long page of questions. A homeowner reading about staircases should find the staircase lead time on the staircase page. That page, with its answers, is an answer page for one kind of work.

The fitting, care and aftercare pages answer questions that arrive after the order, from clients who are already yours. A new client can read them too, to see what happens once the deposit is paid, which is why each is linked from every kind-of-work page.

Writing an answer that stands on its own

Each answer opens with the answer itself, names the workshop, the work and the place, and fits in 40 to 80 words, with the detail underneath. Writing to be cited explains why that shape gives a passage citability, and the answer page template lays a whole service page out around it. Here is one carpentry answer in that shape:

<h2>Can I visit your workshop before I order?</h2>
<p>Yes. [Workshop name] shows clients round the workshop in [town] by
appointment, on [days] between [times]. You can see pieces being made,
handle samples of [the woods we use] with the finishes we apply, and take
a sample board home. Book a visit on [the one phone number] or by email.
Last reviewed [month year].</p>

The same shape works for every row of the table. The lead time answer gives its range and its date, the care answer names the finish, and the aftercare answer states the policy as your terms word it. An answer written this way gives a homeowner what they asked without a phone call, and gives an answer from an assistant a sentence about your workshop to repeat.

In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros in the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, late August to early September 2026), 61.5% had no question-and-answer content of any kind, and 50.7% had a heading phrased as a question with no answer under it that a machine could isolate: the question asked, and the answer missing. Both figures are for all 40 trades; we publish no carpenter-only cut.

Keeping the answers true once they are written

Date every answer that can go stale: the lead time, the price range, the visit days. When one changes, change it wherever it appears, which is easier when each fact lives on one page and the others link to it. Freshness here means a date a reader can see, beside a fact that was true on that date.

If a question keeps arriving after you answered it, the answer is either not where the client looks or does not say what they asked, so move it or rewrite it. Put two or three of the logged questions into your panel, worded as a homeowner would type them, as AI visibility for carpenters describes. The overview for carpenters and joiners lists the rest of what a workshop's site states.