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You have some items that you need to throw away, but you don’t know how to go about it. What do you do? In  this article, I will provide you with a quick view on what are some of the basic steps you can take in order to get rid of your rubbish if you live on the west side in Vancouver.

At this point we will assume that you have a disposal company in mind and we will cover just the  basics. At the 2nd part of this article, we will examine this topic in details.

This is the first steps you need to take. Give them a call and they will need you to provide them with information regarding your junk. For example they will ask you:

Once they have the information they need, they will book a day and time for you. Expect them to be there with the 2-hour window they have provided you with.

This is one of the most common questions clients have. “How much does junk removal cost?”.

Every project is different but most fall within a predictable pricing range. For example single items pick up , such as a couch disposal is around $90. The more items you add, the cheaper it gets per item. For example if a mattress disposal is $90, then few mattresses will be under $200. At this point rubbish removal rates are determined by volume.

This is the day when the guys will show  up and they will take one last look and tell you if there are any adjustment to service rates. It doesn’t happen often, but it is perfectly justifiable considering that describing your rubbish is not that easy to do over the phone. If you don’t like the price, you don’t have to commit.

So, they will load your unwanted items and they will be on their way to dispose of it or recycle it. It is that simple.

Now that you have some basic understanding of how to work with this type of service, lets look into the topic into more details.

How do you know if you are getting the best service for your money? Vancouver is an expensive city and you should demand quality even when someone is hauling away your garbage. You work hard for your money and you deserve a good service.

Today it is easy to get a professional-looking website and populate it with all sorts of claims that clients will believe. However, you are smart enough not to fall for that. For the most part, you should treat this information as a starting point. Give them a call and discuss what you have read. Listen carefully if they are trying to avoid some important questions such as:

I will let you in on a secret. If the first questions are answered with a “No”, then you know that you are dealing with  disposal company that cannot be trusted. Why? Because they are trying to paint you a picture where they seem to have the lowest prices. At the end of the day, all rubbish disposal companies on the West Side do have to pay extra for disposing heavy and abnormal material, and extra labour will cost them more. So, they have to reflect it on their final bill to you. They are just trying to hide it from you until the very end.

Which one is better for you? This really depends on how big is your project, but there is a more important side of this question that we need to cover first. Are they the same? For the most part, not really. When I say “small company” I mean the guy who decides to make some cash money on the weekend with his pickup truck. I don’t mean a company that has one dedicated truck. These guys do take their business seriously and it will be rarity for them not to be able to provide you with what you need.

So, why are these guys with pickup trucks questionable? This is not their focus. Once in a while I get clients who get stranded by those guys. Most of the time they don’t even show up and if they do, there are all sorts of unpleasant experiences I keep hearing about, which I will not go into in this article.

These are the giants. They will provide you with a good service but they will cost you significantly more than the small guys. I wouldn’t go too hard on guys like the 1-800-GOT-JUNK company because they do have more expenses associated with larger call centres and bigger teams in each truck. Their services are liked by many clients but at the same time, as many are able to enjoy garbage removal companies of a smaller size.

Give them a call. As I suggested earlier, talk to them and listen to your instincts. Ask them questions and see how they rank on their honesty. There is no magic bullet, but if someone is trying to fool you, it will become obvious by this conversation.

There is also the easy sings that will allow you to make a quick decision. There are plenty of junk disposal companies in Vancouver who can’t even be polite to their potential clients. For these companies I don’t even need to explain to you why you should not be hiring them.

Lets lay the fundamentals of how hauling companies make a profit. They pay for gas, disposal fees based on weight, disposal fees based on type of junk, and labour cost based on time. So, when they look at your project they want to see light items, that are close to where they can park so they wouldn’t spend too much time loading it. You can’t really control how heavy your junk is, but you can control the labour part. Here is how:

This will allow you to save on the total cost. The guys don’t mind doing all these steps, but they will charge you extra. In general labour is free for the first hour. After that it can be as much as $60/h. Your are in your right not to do any of that work but you have the option to have a more predictable budget.

In this section we will discuss the couch disposal services on the West Side. Vancouver is a vibrant city and people are moving around frequently. So it happens that often they have to get a new couch or the old one is too old or not fitting into the new place. So, in our industry we have to provide furniture disposal services more often than any other garbage removal services.

The rate as of 2016 is close to $90. If you want your couch to be recycled then this will carry on an extra fee. We can take it to the city landfill or take it to a recycling facility in Vancouver. Recycling a couch is very labour intensive and for that reason it will cost you more. However, you have that option. Usually is cost extra $50 to recycle a couch on British Columbia.

What if you have more than one couch? What is the cost then? For all furniture items, the disposal cost for each additional item is about 50% less than the first item.