Pool table removal across the Golden Isles.

Pool tables are deceptively heavy because the slate is the issue. A real pool table — not a plywood-top novelty — uses two or three slate panels for the playing surface, and each panel runs two-hundred-fifty to four-hundred pounds depending on the table’s quality. The frame and legs add another two-hundred or so. Total weight on a quality table can clear a thousand pounds.

So pool tables don’t move in one piece. The felt comes off first, then the rails, then the slate panels separate, then the frame disassembles. Most quality tables need three sets of hands; lighter or smaller ones sometimes go with two. The slate panels are the variable that decides it, so we size the crew to the table in front of us rather than to a rule.

Slate is the honest disappointment of this job. It is heavy, it is not recyclable in any practical sense, and essentially nobody wants it unless they are building a pool table. Now and then we can hand it off to someone with a use for it — a garden project, a workbench top — and we will try. Most of the time it goes to the landfill. It is natural stone, so it is inert and it will simply sit there, but we would rather tell you that than describe a landfill trip as recycling. The frame and the rails route through normal disposal.

One layout we will turn down, and it is worth saying before you book: a slate table at the top of a spiral staircase. Narrow stairs with a hard turn we can work with, carefully. But the geometry of a spiral simply does not accommodate a two-hundred-pound panel of stone, and there is no version of trying it that is safe for the crew or your house. Anything short of that, tell us what the access looks like and we will tell you honestly whether it works.