Excavation and land clearing across New Hanover County, NC.

We cover Wilmington, Carolina Beach, and Kure Beach in this county. Wilmington is mainland, urban, and dense, with lots tightly packed and most new construction happening as infill on small parcels. Carolina Beach and Kure Beach are on Pleasure Island, the barrier island south of the city that runs down to Fort Fisher. The two beach towns are physically and structurally different from the Wilmington jobs — smaller lots, less maneuvering room, salt-air corrosion concerns on equipment, and regulatory layers that mainland work does not have.

New Hanover is the smallest county by land area in NC because most of what would otherwise be county area is water — the Cape Fear River on one side, the Atlantic on the other, the Intracoastal Waterway running between Wilmington and the beach towns. The Port of Wilmington is the largest port in North Carolina by tonnage and it sits at the southern end of the city. The proximity of all that working waterfront pulls a constant stream of light-industrial and supporting site work into the county, much of which uses the same kind of pad-building, drainage, and clearing work we do everywhere else.

The most distinctive thing about working New Hanover compared to the rural counties to the north and west is the lot size. Wilmington infill jobs are often half-acre or quarter-acre parcels with structures already on three sides, mature trees that have to be selectively removed without damaging neighbor property, and access constraints that make staging the equipment a real planning task. We have done enough of these to know how to set up a small site without making a mess of the neighborhood, but the trade-off is that Wilmington jobs typically take longer per cubic yard than the same job would on an open Bladen or Columbus parcel.

New Hanover County and the City of Wilmington both have stricter inspection and permit timelines than the rural counties we work in. That is not a bad thing — it is what you get with a real planning department in a real growing city — but it does mean that any New Hanover quote we write includes some discussion of the permit pathway and the realistic schedule. Quotes where we just say "we will start next week" are not honest in this county. We will tell you what the actual lead time looks like and we will let you decide whether to proceed.