Grown up on the East End, built for the East End
I’m Max Caldwell, and I grew up in Hampton Bays watching the summer change everything. Before I owned a single truck, I spent my twenties loading them — carrying sofas down long gravel driveways and easing dressers through the front doors of shingle-style houses while the owners counted down to Memorial Day. I learned the East End from the back of a moving van: which lanes off Montauk Highway you can’t fit a 26-footer down, which gated associations won’t lift the bar without a Certificate of Insurance in hand, and how fast a botched move can leave a truck stranded on the shoulder of Route 27 with the whole season backing up behind it.
Why I started Max Moving Van Lines
I started this company in 2008 with one box truck and a flatbed, and one stubborn idea: a Hamptons move should be handled by people who actually live here. Too many second-home owners were hiring an off-island outfit that rolled in without a COI, got stopped cold at the gate, and ended up blocking Montauk Highway while the management office shrugged. I watched it happen to a neighbor in North Sea, where I still live, and I decided the part everyone else treats as an afterthought — the insurance certificate, the narrow-lane access, the crating of the fragile things — was going to be the part we built the whole company around.
White-glove, because of what’s in these houses
Estate homes out here are full of pieces you can’t replace: oil paintings, marble-top consoles, antique chests, chandeliers, and wine that took decades to lay down. You don’t move those with a rented dolly and a couple of strangers hired that morning. We build custom wood crates on site, wrap and inventory every piece, and carry it down the longest Belgian-block driveway without a scratch. When the season turns and the second home empties out, we hold the furnishings and the art in climate-controlled, insured storage until you’re back.
Our crew is ours
Everyone on a Max Moving truck is on our payroll — W-2, trained on our boards and crates, and outfitted in our gear. Tomas runs the waterfront-estate crews and knows every gated entrance from Quogue to Montauk. Walter has been crating pianos and fine art for us since 2013. Eleanor clears the COI and writes every flat quote, Reid maps each day around the Shinnecock Canal and the summer bottlenecks so a truck is never stuck in a narrow lane, and Hadley keeps the storage and the gate sign-ins straight. I still walk the bigger jobs myself.
How we price and how we promise
One flat figure, in writing, locked before we touch a thing — no hourly meter creeping up while a crew strolls back and forth, and no surprise line items at the curb. We carry our own NYSDOT license and active US DOT and MC authority, we’re fully insured, and the certificate the gate wants is real and ours. That’s the whole company: clear the gate, crate the irreplaceable, lock the price, and move it down the driveway ourselves.