Mahogany Homes vs Mahogany Tables: Training Construction to 83/99 in OSRS

Game screenshots and facts are cited from the Old School RuneScape Wiki (strategy, equipment, drops, and related pages). Writing is original editorial, not a copy of the wiki article.

Construction is the most notorious gold sink in Old School RuneScape. It is also the skill that turns a bare Rimmington starter house into a personal nexus of ornate pools, occult altars, jewellery boxes, and fairy rings. Players chasing 83 Construction for the ornate jewellery box or 99 for the cape often get stuck choosing between two paths: the minigame Mahogany Homes and the old-school method of carving mahogany tables in a player-owned house. This guide compares both methods, lays out the unlocks that matter, and explains why a maxed house is one of the biggest convenience multipliers an account can have.

Both methods will drain your bank, but they drain it in very different ways. Mahogany Homes trades raw speed for cost efficiency and travel time. Mahogany tables trade money for extreme clicks and no travel. The right choice depends on your budget, attention span, and how much you value the 20–40 hours you will spend banking planks and teleporting around Gielinor.

Who This Is For (and Hard Requirements)

This guide is for anyone with at least 1,000 coins and a willingness to spend either many hours or many millions. If you are an ironman, the same methods apply, but you will need to source planks from Managing Miscellania, the Woodcutting Guild, or monster drops. If you are buying an account, the requirements below tell you exactly why a maxed house commands a premium.

An estate agent in Varrock, Falador, Seers' Village, East Ardougne, or Hosidius sells your first house. The starter house has only a parlour and a garden. You add rooms and furniture by entering building mode, toggled from the House Options interface in the Settings menu. From there, right-click door hotspots to add rooms, and then build furniture at hotspots inside.

How Mahogany Homes Actually Works

Mahogany Homes is a Construction minigame run by Amy in Falador. She assigns you a contract to repair or replace furniture in a random NPC home in Varrock, Falador, East Ardougne, or Hosidius. You travel to the house, use planks and sometimes a steel bar on the broken hotspots, then speak to the homeowner to finish and receive Construction XP plus carpenter points. The tier you choose determines which planks and how many hotspots appear.

Contract tiers scale quickly: Beginner uses normal planks, Novice uses oak, Adept uses teak, and Expert uses mahogany. You may also need steel bars for ranges, sinks, or bathtubs. The location layout is fixed per NPC, so after a few contracts you will memorise each house and stop reading the minimap.

An efficient inventory includes teleport tablets for Varrock, Ardougne, and Falador, a plank sack, a rune pouch with air/astral/cosmic for Astral Contact, a hammer, a saw, steel bars, and planks for the current tier. The plank sack holds 28 planks and is the single best quality-of-life upgrade from the reward shop. Amy's saw or the Imcando hammer in the off-hand frees an inventory slot. Use Astral Contact to call Amy for a new contract without running back to Falador, or use a ring of wealth teleport to Falador Park, a few seconds from Amy.

Rewards are bought with carpenter points. The plank sack costs 350 points and should be your first purchase. Carpenter's outfit pieces—helmet 400, shirt 800, trousers 600, boots 200—grant 2.5% bonus XP for the full set. Amy's saw costs 500 points and is wieldable, freeing an inventory space. Hosidius blueprints at 2,000 points unlock a cosmetic wall kit. A supply crate is 25 points and not worth buying for sustained training.

The Old-School Alternative: Mahogany Tables in Your POH

Traditional Construction training means standing in your own house, building and removing the same piece of furniture thousands of times. At level 52, you can build a mahogany table in a dining room hotspot using 6 mahogany planks, gaining 840 Construction XP. You then remove it and rebuild. This loop is extremely fast but extremely click-intensive, and it uses far more planks per XP than Mahogany Homes.

For lower levels, the progression is crude wooden chairs, oak chairs, oak dining tables, oak larders at 33, and teak garden benches at 66. Each has different XP and cost per XP. Mahogany tables are the standard choice for 52–99 if money is no object, because they are the fastest repeatable furniture in the POH.

To sustain mahogany table training, you need a way to supply planks without bank running. A demon butler will fetch 26 planks from your bank per trip for 10,000 coins every 8 uses, or you can keep your house in Rimmington and run noted planks to Phials, who unnotes them for 5 coins each. The butler is faster but adds a recurring cost. Both methods still pale in cost per XP compared with Mahogany Homes, because each mahogany table only yields 140 XP per plank, while Mahogany Homes averages 346.1 XP per mahogany plank including completion XP.

Unlocks That Make the Grind Worth It

The real reason to train Construction is not the skillcape, although that is a nice perk. It is the player-owned house that becomes a teleport, restoration, and prayer hub. The most important unlocks stack on top of each other:

• Portal chamber (50 Construction) — up to three directed teleport portals.
• Portal nexus (72 Construction) — a single room that can hold many teleports, including Varrock, Falador, Ardougne, and a mounted Xeric's talisman.
• Achievement gallery (80 Construction) — home of the jewellery box, boss lair display, and adventure log. With boosts, the ornate jewellery box becomes buildable at 83, which is why 83 is the most common stopping point before max.
• Superior garden (65 Construction) — the ornate rejuvenation pool and spirit tree/fairy ring ring slot. The pool restores run energy, hitpoints, prayer, and special attack; it is the single most-used feature in a max house.
• Chapel (45 Construction) — a gilded altar or better for prayer training, which pairs well with a separate prayer method.

These rooms do not come cheap. The room costs alone range from 15,000 for a skill hall to 200,000 for a portal nexus and 75,000 for a superior garden. Then you must build the actual furniture, which often requires rare materials like magic stones, gold leaves, and pharaoh's sceptres. The ornate jewellery box alone takes a dragonstone, onyx, and zenyte jewellery set. This is why many players stop at 83 and boost with a crystal saw and spicy stew rather than pushing to 99 for the cape.

Breaking Down the Time and Cost Tradeoffs

The table below compares the main methods using data from the Mahogany Homes and Construction training pages. Mahogany table XP rates are not listed on the wiki because they depend on butler speed and clicks, but they are generally the highest raw XP per hour at the cost of much more attention. Treat numbers as live estimates—GE prices for planks move daily.

For a budget-conscious path, Oak plank Mahogany Homes averages 200 XP per oak plank, while teak gives 287.9 and mahogany gives 346.1. That means oak Homes is the cheapest XP in the skill, but it caps at Novice/Adept rates. Teak Homes at Adept and Expert is the middle ground. Mahogany Homes with mahogany planks on Expert is around 5.1 gp/XP at current GE prices, while mahogany tables cost 13.5 gp/XP. If you have 70+ Construction and can tolerate travel, Mahogany Homes is roughly half the cost per XP of tables, but at less than a third of the raw XP per hour.

Common Mistakes That Burn GP or Time

Most Construction regret comes from small inefficiencies repeated for thirty hours. Avoid these:

• Skipping the plank sack. It costs 350 points and holds 28 planks. Without it, you bank twice as often in Mahogany Homes, killing XP/hr.
• Using mahogany planks too early. If your cash stack cannot handle 70–99 Expert contracts, drop to teak or oak. Oak Mahogany Homes to 83 is dramatically cheaper than mahogany, even if it takes longer.
• Forgetting steel bars. Expert contracts have a 67–100% chance to require a steel bar at some NPCs. A single missing bar means a wasted trip.
• No Astral Contact or POH nexus. Running back to Amy every contract is the fastest way to halve your XP/hr. Set up Lunar spells or a portal nexus with Xeric's talisman as soon as possible.
• Not using building mode correctly. For POH training, you must toggle building mode on before entering. If guests are in your house, you cannot toggle it. Remove guests first.
• Paying a servant but not using it. If you have a demon butler, use it every time. If not, move to Rimmington and use Phials to unnote planks for 5 coins each.

Why a Maxed House Moves Account Value (and When Buying Is the Honest Shortcut)

On the account market, a player-owned house with a portal nexus, ornate pool, occult altar, ornate jewellery box, and fairy ring is one of the strongest selling points after combat stats. Buyers know that a maxed POH saves hundreds of hours over the life of an account: no more running to banks, no more using other people's houses on party worlds, no more settling for a sub-83 construction stopgap.

Grinding 70–99 Construction via Expert Mahogany Homes costs roughly 75–90 million coins in planks and steel bars depending on GE prices, and takes 40–60 hours of travel-heavy play. The same range via mahogany tables costs 150–200 million but can be done in under 20 hours of focused clicking. Neither price includes the 100–200 million for the ornate pool, occult altar, and jewellery box themselves. When you buy an account with max house instead, you skip all of that grind and all of that gold, but you should still verify the account has the rooms and furniture you actually want.

When evaluating an account purchase, check the Construction level, the rooms actually built, and whether boosts have already been used for the ornate jewellery box. A level 91 Construction with no superior garden is less useful than 83 with a fully built pool, altar, and nexus. Also consider linked requirements: a gilded altar pairs with high Prayer, and a spirit tree/fairy ring improves Slayer and clue efficiency. The account's value is in the whole package, not just the cape.

If you are not buying and still want the fastest path, use this decision tree: low budget → Mahogany Homes with oak or teak to 83, buy plank sack and Carpenter's outfit first. High budget and hate travel → mahogany tables with demon butler. High budget and want some variety → Mahogany Homes Expert with mahogany planks. Any path to 83 unlocks the ornate jewellery box with boosts, and any path to 99 gets you the Construction cape, which allows unlimited house teleports.

Sources

• Construction
• Mahogany Homes
• Player-owned house
• Construction training
• Ironman Guide/Construction