Specialty pieces on Maui split into three categories: the rare upright piano that survived the salt air for fifty years and now needs to ride into a container, the 700-pound gun safe that came over on a mainland container ten years ago and is heading back, and the heirloom koa furniture (great-grandmother’s armoire, the platform bed Kainoa’s grandfather built out of milo, the Kapalua-era hutch with the inlaid Hawaiian pattern) that needs custom wood-crate work before it touches a sea container. Devin Kahale runs every specialty job at WMP, with Marcus on the container-side crating when the piece is going off-island. The starting figure on a stand-alone piano, safe or heirloom container-crate job is $485.
Container-bound wood crates with humidity-resistant wrap
Anything heading into a 20-foot or 40-foot dry container for an inter-island Pasha sail or a Matson mainland sail gets its own custom-cut plywood-cushion crate built at the Wakea Avenue yard the day before. The crate is dry-fit, then disassembled, then transported to the piece’s location, reassembled around the piece, and the cushion-foam layer goes between the crate wall and the surface so the wood never touches the wood. Humidity-resistant stretch wrap layers under the crate, silica-gel sachets inside the cushion-foam layer, and the whole unit becomes a single loadable piece that the receiving crew on the mainland uncrates in the destination room.
The rare Maui upright, the koa heirloom, the 700-pound safe
Maui uprights are usually 1920s-through-1960s pieces that came over from the mainland with the plantation families and never left. They have to be tuned by a Honolulu piano tech a week before the move because the cabinet rigidity matters, then padded with quilted blankets, then staircased on a four-strap rig with the climbing dolly. Koa heirlooms get the cushion-crate treatment described above. Gun safes 600 to 1,000 pounds ride on the engineered four-wheel safe dolly with a weight-balanced load and a separate two-mover lift-team at the stairs. Walk-boards stay on every dolly route across pier-and-post plantation floors so the piece never crosses a single joist.
What's Covered
- Devin Kahale on every specialty job as chief, with Marcus added on the container-bound crate work for inter-island Pasha and mainland Matson sails
- Custom plywood-cushion crate cut and dry-fit at the Wakea Avenue yard the day before, reassembled around the piece in the source room, foam between crate wall and wood
- Engineered four-wheel safe dolly rated for 1,200 pounds with weight-balanced load, paired with a two-mover stair lift-team on any flight carry
- Quilted blanket pad-wrap, e-track strapping, walk-boards across pier-and-post plantation floor joists, and the climbing dolly for upright piano staircase work
- Container-side humidity-resistant stretch wrap with silica-gel sachets inside the cushion-foam layer for any piece heading into a 14-day sea transit
- Pre-move walkthrough by Devin documenting the method on the piece, the path to the truck, the destination room and the receiving-end uncrate plan
What's the Cost?
Two uniformed Akamai-crew W-2 movers plus the 26-ft straight truck post out of the Wakea Avenue gate at $195 an hour; for a studio, junior one-bedroom or a tight in-building lanai-to-lanai swap that slots cleanly into a half-day, Tyler will lock it as a flat figure instead, opening at $595 all-in.
Everything the day calls for is folded into that hourly figure: the two W-2 movers themselves, the 26-ft We Move People truck, quilted blankets, masonite floor runners, two-wheel and four-wheel dollies, ratchet straps, walk-boards, and the trade-wind humidity mats we put down off the porch in any month with salt on the sidewalk. Fuel adders, third-floor stair charges, long-carry charges from the alley to the door — none of those line items show up on a We Move People invoice, period.
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