Junk removal on the steep streets of the Avenues

The short answer

Nothing about the Avenues changes what you pay. A sofa is $126, a queen mattress is $103, a refrigerator is $164, a quarter truck is $241. There is no hill charge, no long-carry charge, no narrow-access charge and no winter charge. The $75 minimum is the same as it is on the flat in West Valley.

What the Avenues change is the planning. Which way the truck comes in, whether it parks on the street or in the alley, and how far the crew is carrying. Tell us those three things when you book and the day runs.

The grid is the problem and the solution

The Avenues run on a tight lettered-and-numbered grid climbing north from South Temple toward the foothills, and the blocks are short. That is good news: there is almost always a legal place to stop within a block of your door, even when your own frontage is impossible.

The bad news is the gradient. From about 5th Avenue up, and harder again above 8th, the cross streets pitch steeply and the ones running east-west sit on a side slope. A loaded truck does not reverse up a wet, iced Avenues block with cars on both sides, and any crew that says otherwise has not tried it. Ours park on the nearest safe flat and carry. That is a scheduling decision, not a pricing one.

Driveways here were built for a Model A

Avenues driveways are narrow, short and steep, and many of them drop sharply from the street to a single-width detached garage at the back of the lot. Some are barely wider than a modern pickup mirror to mirror. A box truck is not going down one of them, and if one did it would not come back up in February.

Which is why the rear alleys matter. A lot of Avenues blocks have them, and where the alley is passable it is by far the best approach — the truck sits directly behind the garage and nobody carries anything past the front of the house. Where it is not passable, usually because a neighbor parks in it or it has not been cleared since the last storm, we work off the street instead.

The steps from the street to the front door

This is the signature Avenues detail. The house sits above the street behind a retaining wall, and the route in is a flight of concrete steps — sometimes six, sometimes twenty-five, occasionally with a turn halfway. Then there is usually a porch step, then a storm door that swings the wrong way, and then the interior stairs.

So a sofa coming out of an upstairs Avenues bedroom is carried down two interior flights and then down a public staircase to the street. It is genuinely the hardest carry in this city, and it is included. A sofa is $126 whether it comes off a porch in Rose Park or down twenty-five steps on 6th Avenue.

What comes out of these houses

The stock is largely pre-1925, much of it cut into upper and lower units at some point, and much of it with a full basement. The usual job list:

A renovation clearout after a bathroom came out of a 1912 house: cast iron bathtub $185 + detached toilet $64 + bathroom vanity $69 = $318. A basement clear: cast iron radiator $123 + storage cabinet $74 + large junk pile $208 = $405, against a half truck at $431 — so the item list wins.

Winter on a north-facing block

The Avenues hold ice. East-west blocks that face north keep packed snow on the pavement and on the front steps for weeks after the main roads are clear, and the retaining-wall staircases are the last thing anybody shovels. Add an inversion week where nothing melts and the whole approach becomes a skating rink with a sofa on it.

Three things that genuinely help, none of which cost you anything:

• Clear and salt the street steps and the path to the door the night before.
• Move your own car so the crew can use your frontage, if the street is tight.
• Tell us if the alley is snowed in, so we plan for a street carry instead of discovering it.

Booking from the Avenues

When you book, say which avenue and which street, whether there is a rear alley, how many steps there are from the street to the door, and what floor the items are on. Every one of those affects how long we book, and none of them affects the price. You approve the total in advance and it does not move.

The same applies on the blocks either side — Capitol Hill, the Marmalade, Federal Heights and the streets running down toward the university. Same grid problems, same flat prices.

Frequently asked questions