When You’re in a Tight Spot and Need a Quick Lift, Hire a Crane

Jane Hall’s 19th century English pine refectory table is one problematic piece of furniture. When she left New York for Washington in 1998, the 8 1/2-foot-long antique proved so cumbersome it had to be loaded atop--not inside--the apartment building’s elevator.

After two years of living near American University in a small rented condo, Hall, a journalism professor, bought more spacious digs on another floor. Alas, structural vagaries of the building prevented said table from passing through the front doorway of the new flat.

It sat in the hallway for a time, irritating the neighbors and violating building rules, before her landlady allowed her to stash it in the old apartment while Hall searched for a solution. “You cannot take it apart because you will ruin the wooden dowels,” warned an antiques dealer whom she summoned for an emergency assessment.

“So I asked if he had any other brilliant ideas. He suggested renting a crane from United Rigging of Beltsville [Md.]. ‘You can do anything if you have enough money,’ he said. ‘This ain’t gonna go through the door.’ ”

The company diverted a crane from a nearby commercial job, and the crew “did a kind of practice swing. Ultimately, they wrapped the table, attached it to a block and tackle and brought it up the side of the building to the fifth floor in the back,” said Hall.

“The table was suspended outside my balcony, swinging slightly. My daughter was fascinated. They lifted it over and brought it through the sliding-glass balcony doors into the dining area. The table was in wonderful shape. It all had this quality of serendipity,” recalled Hall. “At the time, I thought this is the craziest thing I’ve ever done. But I did not want to sell it.”

Although cranes are more commonly found at construction sites--lifting steel beams, stacks of drywall and air-conditioning units--they occasionally see residential duty.

“Residential work is a very small part of our business, maybe one or two jobs a month and nearly always last-minute,” said Jon Flaesch, operations manager of United Rigging, which came to Hall’s rescue. “Very often, it’s in the Old Town section of Alexandria [Va.], where they have older homes with stairways that aren’t large. We use a crane, a forklift or a duck and jack to get things up.”

Hall’s job took less than an hour and cost a steep $800, a sum she willingly parted with because the table is a particular favorite and had been appraised at $5,000--though “I didn’t pay anywhere near that much,” she quickly interjected.

There is something both comical and surreal about watching large household objects--a grand piano, an armoire, a sofa, hot tub or safe--suspended high above the streets while down below, an operator cocooned inside the relatively small cab of a very large machine delicately maneuvers the payload toward its target.

One can almost hear the panic in the voices of those desperate to get some ungainly object in or out of a tight space as the clock ticks.

“These guys called me two days before they needed me about moving the bottom of a hutch out of their apartment. It . . . wouldn’t fit in the elevator,” said Brian Townsend, president of AC Crane & Sign Service of Rockville, Md. “They called me out of the Yellow Pages.”

Townsend’s crew carefully hoisted the hutch over a 12th-floor balcony rail, and the crane deposited it in the parking lot. The hourlong job cost about $300.

Most people don’t foresee problems until, like Hall, they are in mid-move, said Flaesch.

Residential work is essentially “the old situation where a guy builds a boat in his basement. How does he get it out? We had a situation where we actually had to lift one out of a backyard with a big crane. It was very expensive,” said Flaesch.

But neither furniture nor seagoing vessels top the list of homeowners’ crane cargo.

“The biggest thing we do with residential work is with people who are buying and planting mature trees in their backyards. We take a crane and hoist them over the roof,” said Wayne Gregory, Digging & Rigging’s scheduler.

Price depends on the size of the crane--some can extend a dozen stories or more--and the complexity of the job.