Design Trade Installs: Drapes in Santa Rosa Beach, Art in Niceville, a Dining Room in Burnt Pine

Last week ran across three towns and three different design firms, and none of it was a move. Zack spent part of a day in a Santa Rosa Beach primary bedroom hanging drapery panels for the designers at Tracery Interiors. Les was in Niceville hanging art at a Lily Pads Interiors estate sale. And Zack and Keith finished a furniture install at a home in Burnt Pine, in Miramar Beach, setting a dining room and walking the house for final touches.

Three jobs, one kind of work — and it is the part of what we do that the word "movers" describes worst. Nobody was relocating. There were no labeled boxes, no inventory list from a homeowner, and on two of the three, no homeowner in the house at all. There was a designer, a plan, and furnishings that each had exactly one right place to end up.

What a design trade install actually is

A design trade install is the day a room stops being a plan and becomes a room. The furnishings have usually been ordered for months. They have come off a freight truck, sat in a receiving warehouse or a garage, and been handled at least once by somebody who was not thinking about them. Our job is to get them into the house, out of their crates, and into position — and to do it without marking a finished floor, a fresh baseboard, or the piece itself.

The order matters more than people expect. Pieces come off the truck in the order the rooms get set, not the order they were loaded. A dining table goes in before the chairs and before the rug is walked on. Art goes up after the furniture is placed, because the furniture is what the art gets centered on. Get the sequence wrong and you are moving the same 200-pound console twice.

That is the Burnt Pine job. The truck is on the paver drive rather than the lane, which is a small decision that matters in a gated community where a blocked road is somebody else’s complaint by lunchtime. Pavers are also the reason we walk pieces rather than roll them — a hand truck wheel on a paver seam is how a joint pops and how a heavy piece gets away from you.

The last hour is the part the client sees

Most of an install day is unremarkable: carry, unwrap, place, adjust. The last hour is different. That is when the dining chairs get squared to the table, the rug gets straightened, the packing material leaves the house, and somebody walks every room looking for the thing that is a quarter-inch off. Zack and Keith spent the end of the Burnt Pine day doing exactly that.

It is also the reason designers book a crew instead of a delivery service. A delivery ends when the item is in the house. An install ends when the designer looks at the room and has nothing left to point at.

Drapery day in Santa Rosa Beach

Drapery is its own thing. Panels arrive folded or rolled, and every crease you put in them on install day is one somebody has to steam out later. They get carried flat, kept off the floor, and hung without being dragged across anything.

The ladder work is the unglamorous half. A primary bedroom with a made bed and a finished floor gives you nowhere to set a ladder that is not either on the bed or on the rug, so the ladder gets padded feet and somebody holds it. The bed gets covered before anything goes up over it. None of that is complicated — it is just the difference between a clean job and a conversation about a mark on a duvet.

Who does what on a drapery job

We handle the panels and the labor on install day. If hardware needs to go up, that goes past Keith first — he is our installer and he has the final say on what we can safely mount once he has seen the actual wall. Electrical and plumbing stay with the licensed trades, the same line we draw with plumbers on a fixture delivery. If you are a designer and you want to know exactly where our scope stops before you schedule us, call and ask. We would rather answer it on the phone than on the day.

Hanging art in an occupied house

The Niceville job was different again — an estate sale for Lily Pads Interiors, in a furnished house, with a four-poster bed already in place and a large framed landscape going up behind it.

Art over a bed is a two-person job even when the piece is light, because the reach is long and there is nothing under you to stand on. Les worked that one to the marks the designer set. A framed piece is also the easiest thing on any job to damage and the hardest to hide once you have: the frame corner, the wire, and the wall are three separate ways to get it wrong.

We supply the hanging hardware when a piece did not come with the right kind, which is more often than you would think on estate and resale work. And where something needs to be mounted rather than hung — a television, a heavy mirror, shelving — Keith looks at the wall in person before we commit. A mount is only as good as what is behind the drywall, and around here that could be wood stud, metal stud, block, or plaster over lath depending on the decade the house went up.

Estate sale work in general is a category we see more of than people would guess. Somebody has to stage a house so it photographs and shows well, and then somebody has to move what sells. Both ends are ours.

What we ask for before an install day

Gate code, the contact who is actually on site, where the truck can park, and whether other trades will be in the house at the same time. Those four answers set the whole day. A crew sitting at a gate is burning your hours, and an install running alongside a painter is two crews working around each other instead of working.

For houses that are not finished yet, we bring our own floor protection rather than assuming the builder’s is where we need it. We wrote up how that goes in the new-construction move guide, and there is a companion note from an install day on 30A with Design & Dwell Homes covering the furniture side of the same situation.

Why designers keep the same crew

Every firm we work with has been burned once by a delivery that showed up with two people for a four-person piece, or a crew that set a console two inches off and left. The value of a crew you have used before is that they already know your marks matter, your floors are finished, and "room of choice" is not the finish line.

Josh, Zack, Les, and Keith own the company and we are the ones who show up. There is no subcontractor between a designer and the person carrying their client’s dining table. If you are a designer or a builder on the Emerald Coast and you want to talk about receiving, delivery, and install days, get in touch — we will tell you straight what we handle and what we do not.

Licensed and insured. FL Mover Reg. #IM4125. Serving Walton, Okaloosa, and Bay Counties from Santa Rosa Beach.