Installation & Crating in Charlotte

Yes, we cover Charlotte, and it is where we do the most specialty work. Custom crates built on site for fine art and antiques, heavy mirrors on two-story walls, and televisions mounted over stacked stone. About an hour up I-85 from Gaffney, and crossing the state line changes neither the price nor the schedule.

Charlotte is our largest market and the reason is the housing stock rather than the population. The city gives us four genuinely different kinds of wall and each one calls for something different.

In Myers Park, Dilworth and Elizabeth the houses are pre-war and the fireplaces are structural brick with a plaster surround. Those walls hold beautifully once you are into the brick, and they punish anyone who assumes the plaster is drywall. Eastover and Foxcroft add heavy plaster ceilings and the kind of art that gets insured separately from the house.

SouthPark and Ballantyne are the two-story great room, the stone or shiplap surround, and a television that is a foot taller than the last one the owner had. That is the above-fireplace mount with a full-motion arm and an in-wall wire run - the job people are most nervous about, and the one we do most.

Uptown and South End are high-rise, which is a different problem entirely. Post-tension slabs, steel studs at consistent centres, concrete you cannot simply attack with a hammer drill and hope. The anchor matters far more than the muscle, and a building that requires certificate-of-insurance paperwork before you come up the service elevator is a normal Tuesday for us.

The fourth kind of work here is the one that actually pays best: crating. Charlotte moves art constantly - collectors, corporate relocations into the banking towers, estates being broken up, galleries shipping in and out. Somebody has a piece that has to travel and a moving company has told them a blanket and a strap will be fine. It will not be fine for a gilded frame, a marble top or a canvas that flexes. We build the crate around the piece where it stands.

We have worked Mecklenburg County for years and we are honest about being a South Carolina business. It matters less than people expect. Gaffney to Uptown is under an hour of interstate, we carry the same crew and the same tools across the line, and there is no border surcharge on the quote.

One practical note for Charlotte specifically: if your piece is going overseas - and in this market a surprising amount of it is - say so when you call. International shipments are subject to ISPM 15, which requires solid wood packing material to be heat treated and stamped. Untreated wood gets a shipment refused at the port. It changes what we build with, and it is a far easier conversation to have before the crate exists than after.