Admin, Author at Lansing Junk Removal

Moving In Together: Tips for a Harmonious Blend of Households

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So you’ve decided to take the plunge and move in together – that’s a huge step! Whether you’re moving in with a partner, friend or family, combining households isn’t always the easiest task. This is particularly true if you’re taking this step later in life as opposed to your early 20s as each of you has collected quite a bit of furniture, heirlooms and, maybe most importantly, kitchen appliances. Both (or all) of you have to compromise and decide what stays and what goes. But what do you do with the “getting rid of” items? Consider a junk removal company to help you declutter your newly combined household so you can have a space that perfectly combines each of your styles and comfortability.

Deciding which items you keep or get rid of isn’t always easy, but figuring it out before the move can help save time, energy and frustration. With summer approaching and the weather turning nice, the peak of the moving season is quickly approaching in Lansing.

Take an Inventory

Chances are, each of you owns the basics. In the kitchen, this may include coffee makers, toasters, microwaves, pots and pans, and cooking utensils. Unless that coffee pot has significant sentimental value, you probably won’t need two in the kitchen you now share.

Taking an inventory, even if informal, allows you to see a list of duplicate items before you move into the new place. This isn’t applicable only for kitchen items – furniture takes up the most space in any living environment and too much makes for a confined, cluttered space.

Decide Which of Each Item You’re Keeping

Deciding whose coffee maker or lounge chair stays may be one of the most difficult tasks of moving in together – aside of course from the physical moving! Although it’s not always possible to figure all these details out before the move, getting a headstart on this step will allow for a smoother moving process.

Packing Up and Downsizing

While you’re packing for the move, keep the items you’ve decided to get rid of in their own area; a dedicated room or corner will allow you to keep these items separated. Once you have all items separated out, it’s time to decide what to do with them.

Selling items in good condition is always an option, particularly for items such as nice furniture or kitchen appliances. Unfortunately, it can take time to find a buyer. Throwing away functional items and those with life left in them is wasteful. Consider calling us in to help you get rid of your items at one time.

Our team will remove the items and load them, allowing you to reserve your time and energy for more important things – like lovingly wrapping each of your knick-knacks and packing them carefully into moving boxes. We believe in donating and recycling as much of our pickups as possible, keeping items out of landfills, and ensuring they get used while they’re still functional, so while you’re getting ready to enjoy your new home, someone else is grateful for your trusty recliner or coffee pot! We proudly offer junk removal service in Lansing and the surrounding area.

The Quarantine Cleanup: Finding a Junk Removal Company for the Finished Project

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Since March, the rise of COVID-19 has remained the primary news story across the United States — Michigan is certainly no exception. With executive orders in place for residents to stay home except for essential business, many Lansing area residents are feeling the stress of being “cooped up” with nowhere to go. Junk removal services may not seem to correlate with what’s going on, but many Lansing area residents may need to use the service during or just after the executive orders are withdrawn. Quarantine cleanup may help you cope during this time.

Stress from the quarantine

Everyone copes with stress in different ways. This has led many residents to tackle the “I’ll get to it later” tasks that have been on their minds for weeks, months or, let’s face it, years. Like with many home projects, you’re likely to find a few items during the project that need to go!

The stress associated with this pandemic has manifested in ways many people never imagined; even people with relatively low-stress lives are experiencing stress levels causing depression and anxiety. Keeping busy during the pandemic may help.

Daily routine

In an article for Psychology Today, Marlynn Wei M.D., J.D. suggests creating a daily routine may help as it can mimic our lives before the shutdown, especially when creating a schedule that aligns with ‘going to work.’ Because many of us aren’t working from home due to being furloughed, creating a routine of projects may help reset our brains into “work mode” and ease some of the stress associated with a disrupted schedule.

It may seem irrelevant to set a schedule when you’re stuck at home and simply doing home projects, but treating it like your job may help alleviate the stress and anxiety of not working at the moment. Even for those of us working during the pandemic, we are not going about our regular activities like normal and spending much more time at home.

Tackling the projects

If this has led you to work on various projects around the home – gardening, situating your garage, remodeling or cleaning out the attic, we’ve got you covered when you’re ready to get rid of the unwanted items you’ve found. We are taking extra precautions during the global pandemic to ensure we are limiting the spread of COVID-19. We offer curbside and no-contact pickup and we are continually sanitizing our equipment.

Connect with Lansing Junk Removal today to get rid of your stuff.

Spring Cleaning: Decluttering Your Home and Life for a Fresh Start

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Every year as more sunlight fills our days and the daffodils start peeking up from the soil, many of us experience newfound energy and sense of optimism. Many of us also use this time of year to perform a deeper clean of the house. The term “spring cleaning” has been used so many times it’s used as a catch-phrase and even as a slang term. While a number of people consider spring cleaning a necessary part of maintaining a home, others see it as a time to purge, clean and reorganize.

It’s not just about deep cleaning those nooks and crannies, although you definitely need to make sure and get those areas! Decluttering is a major part of spring cleaning and research is showing it has several benefits. Decluttering your home provides benefits to your mental health and is the focus of a few studies lately.

A few benefits include improving your overall mood and reducing the amount of stress women face in their daily lives by reducing the clutter.

Tick that List

Before you begin your spring cleaning and decluttering endeavor, make a list of areas you know for sure you want to tackle. This list helps you stay on top of things without getting sidetracked or running out of time for a key area.

Focus on Specific Areas

Instead of listing “master bathroom,” consider instead making one item on your list “bathroom medicine cabinets.” If you have several medicine cabinets in the house, this allows you to remember to hit them all. Don’t try to tackle every area in one day – it can become overwhelming and frustrating. Instead, maybe do one area per day during the week and save the big projects for the weekend.

The Three Piles

When going through closets, cabinets, pantries and the like, make three different piles: one of stuff you’re keeping, one of stuff you’re definitely tossing, and one of stuff you’re either not sure about or can donate. If you find yourself with a lot of usable stuff, consider hosting a purge party with friends. A purge party allows you and your friends to swap clothes, unopened or barely used toiletries, or even household items.

The Final Bit

When you’ve finished decluttering your home, there’s no shame in your junk game! If you realize you need a junk removal service to get what your purge party left behind, we can help with that.

Even now during COVID-19 Lansing Junk Removal is offering no contact junk removal to help make your spring cleaning easier. Contact us today to get started.

Post-Holiday Cleanup: How to Safely Dispose of Replaced Items

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Now that we’re through the holiday season, a lot of us are going through a mix of changes: the post-holiday blues combined with the refreshment of a new year. After the holidays, many of our social calendars clean up, leaving us with more time at home after our daily grind. The holiday season puts many people into a rush of excitement, social engagements, maybe a little anxiety and stress, and, of course, the gifts! Many people gift themselves large items for their home during the holidays, which leads to the issue of figuring out what to do with the old items. Such items include new furniture and new appliances. Post-holiday cleanup is easy with Lansing Junk Removal.

What to do with the old items?

Gifting yourself and your family these large-ticket items feels wonderful and really helps turn your house into your dream home, but what do you do with the items you’re replacing? We have many options at our fingertips for getting rid of these items, including selling online, placing at the curb, donating – you name it! Selling often comes to mind first due to the cash aspect: you have an item in usable condition, someone needs that item, they trade you cold hard cash. It’s a win-win, but it’s not always instant and sometimes you have to store the items when you don’t really have the space. Placing at the curb is another option, but unfortunately this puts your usable items to waste.

Heavy trash pickup

Most cities and local governments impose certain rules for heavy trash pickup, sometimes called bulk. For example, the city of Lansing has specific rules for bulk trash. Bulk is defined as “Large items that are over 30 pounds and longer than four feet in length (ex. appliances and furniture).” The first item is $33 as of January 2020; each additional item costs $16.50 for pickup. In addition, you must schedule your bulk pickup with the city. You also have to follow certain rules for items, including removing doors from refrigerators and freezers. Getting the items out to the curb is another story – these heavy items are often awkward to move. You can also place items on the curb for people to pick up free, unfortunately, if you pay the city to remove the items, you’ll be out at least the $33 if someone snags the item before trash pickup.

Another option

Lansing Junk Removal offers another option: let us come haul away the items you replaced. Our trained team can safely remove the items from your home – you don’t have to lift a finger for this one! We also take care to make sure we donate every item we can, keeping your old working refrigerator out of the dump and placing it where it can provide service to someone else. What we can’t donate, we recycle – we try to keep as much out of the landfill as possible.

Call today for your free quote on your post-holiday cleanup!

Hoarding: How to Help a Loved One

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Hoarding remains a common problem throughout our country and it takes on many forms. It’s not always the messy, dirty piles of random stuff as seen on television shows. Sometimes it’s an organized room stacked to the brim with important items or documents. Often, hoarding is an outcome of a mental problem the person may or may not be aware of.

Hoarding can lead to frustration

After years of hoarding, it becomes more of an issue of the person giving up – cleaning or organizing a small part of their home doesn’t seem to make a dent in the overall appearance of the home. Frustration and depression may occur at this point – which is why it’s critical to offer love and support, and a little help along the way. As a Lansing area junk removal and hauling service, we’re here to help, as well.

Hoarding creates more problems than just an eyesore. If the home becomes unsanitary, first responders may red-tag the home, meaning they won’t come back until it’s cleaned up. Your loved one may become physically ill due to unsanitary conditions and infestations, or fall into
deeper depression not being able to live their life in the way they’d like to.

Providing support

Helping your loved one make the decision to start cleaning up should first involve more care than simply telling them it needs done. For many suffering through hoarding, it’s not as simple as saying “OK, get rid of it!” Memories may be attached to items or they may have a hard time accepting the disrepair. Explain the many benefits of the process, including being able to enjoy having friends and family over, the flexibility to experience every room of the home and, in cases of unsanitary conditions, the health benefits of cleaning up the space.

Every case and person is different, along with the outcomes of speaking to them regarding the situation. Some people may panic at the act or even thought of removing items from the home; others may be more than willing to help with the process as they see the light at the end of the tunnel.

We can help

This process isn’t always an easy one – but oftentimes a necessity. If you need help tackling a hoarding situation of a loved one, we’re here. We can help remove everything or assist the homeowner in the process of going through individual items.

When Your Garage is Everything but a Garage: Clean Up, Clean Out, Organize!

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Having a garage is an added bonus for many of us in the Lansing area. Have you thought how a garage cleanout could help you this winter? Cold winters, wet springs, dry summers, and wet falls. The weather changes almost constantly and it’s not uncommon for us to experience the weather of three seasons in one week (let’s face it – sometimes in one day!). Keeping the car in the garage gives us a little peace of mind – no scraping ice off the windshield, no leaves stuck in the wipers and protection from the damage winds and storms may cause.

The Garage

Unfortunately, however, our garages often become a catch-all space for everything – storage boxes, old appliances, countertops you removed from the kitchen when you remodeled, a pile of toys and sporting goods for the kids, and everything else! Before you call us for junk removal or old appliance removal, check out some tips for organizing your space, and deciding what stays and what goes.

Everything in Its Place

Wire shelving and plastic totes remain king when looking for storage and organization tips for the garage. Used in conjunction, these two common products turn a frustrating situation into organizational bliss. Start with labeling the totes – a large permanent marker is great for this project or you can dress it up by using stencils. If you’d rather not mark on your totes, label their places on the shelves. Putting the totes on shelves creates an easier method of accessing individual totes (without shelves, the totes often stack on top of each other, making it difficult for you to retrieve the goods from the bottom of the stack). If you’re a little handier, building tracks on the ceiling to hang totes from frees up additional floor space!

If you have old cabinets you’d rather not get rid of just yet, consider using them in the garage rather than just storing them! Even an old medicine cabinet proves useful for storing garage items such as car products or cleaning products. Base cabinets and old countertops make for a functional garage workspace along the wall. Makes a garage cleanout easier.

Pile It Up

Once you’ve completed some basic organization projects, decide what stays and what goes by organizing your items in different areas. Non-working fridge taking up valuable space? Move it to one side and start putting your “junk” beside it. Not sure about the rest of the cabinets or that old chair? Keep them separated until you’re sure. For your “keep” items, put away what you can in dedicated areas, then make another pile for the rest.

Once you’ve decided what stays and what goes (even if you have a few “maybe” items), give us a call! Our trained staff will come out and remove what goes – including the old fridge! Once you’ve deleted the junk, you’ll have more room to organize the items that stayed, and more room to park your car right before winter sneaks into the Lansing area.

Getting Ready for the Holidays: A Facelift for Your Home

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As soon as October hits, we start seeing and hearing more advertisements for furniture, flooring, and electronics retailers and wholesalers. Why? The answer isn’t too surprising: more people want to give their living space a facelift — sometimes a complete redo — in anticipation
of having more guests over or simply giving themselves a gift. Getting ready for the holidays may inspire a facelift for your home.

New Space

When you put time and effort into designing an incredible new entertaining or living space, it’s nice to have the validation that comes along with seeing friends and family enjoy your home during a time of the year when togetherness is celebrated.

Is your dining table even large enough for the holiday party you have already planned? Will your 15-year-old oven handle the pies you added to your menu? Does that wine stain from last year’s party stick out like a sore thumb? Chances are, there’s something we’ve all thought about
changing in our homes and many people choose this time of year to make that change.

Plan Now

Starting the planning in October or early November allows you some leeway in time before the parties start happening. It gives you the time to make last-minute changes or to ensure the delivery and installation completes on time. Many companies also offer incentives and special sales this time of year — bonus if you have a big change in mind, whether you’re planning events at your home or you’ve just really wanted to change your furniture out!

Like clothing and vehicles, a new trend always pops up with the various aspects of decorating a home. This includes your living room suite, bathroom fixtures, flooring, even appliances or accessories! Whether you’re trying to “keep up with the Joneses” or you make the decision
you’re simply ready for something new, you have to figure out what to do with the old – that’s where we come in! You need a junk removal company to help relieve you of your older items.

We Can Help

Our highly trained staff will come in and remove during your “out with the old, in with the new!” phase, allowing you to create your dream entertaining space in time for all the parties and intimate get-togethers you have up your sleeve. We help make getting ready for the holidays easier. You don’t have anything to feel guilty about, either, as we’re dedicated to keeping as much out of the landfill as possible; we donate or recycle everything we’re able to!

Switching to an Open Office Concept: Pros and Cons. Oh, and What About the Stuff?

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The open office concept has re-emerged in modern times as a collaborative, team-friendly working environment embraced by many industries. The traditional cubicle, which has seen a long life as it originated in the 1960s, can come across as divisive, numb and claustrophobic.

Open offices take on many forms, from benching systems where workers sit at a long, shared bench desk, to a more modern, functional and aesthetically appealing office situation. Both types – open and closed – offices have pros and cons, so which one is right for you?

New Design

The answer may not be simple – you have cost, employee reception and the time period of adjustment to look at; you also have to look at how such a drastic change can affect productivity and, let’s face it, your bottom line. Both open and closed designs have fans and naysayers alike.
Part of the solution for making the open concept work is showing employees your enthusiasm for the new design, according to Harvard Business Review.

Discussing the plan and getting feedback from your employees before the transition may be pivotal in the overall success of your new collaborative space. More importantly, embracing and acknowledging any concerns followed by acting on them can greatly improve your outcome. The HBR study showed that employees are more likely to embrace and show enthusiasm for working more closely with their teammates when their leaders are also excited to do so.

Some Like Tradition

Not all employees interviewed are fans of the open concept – and this might be something you have come across when transitioning. The cubicle, while disliked by many, has several key benefits that have made them comfortable and ideal spaces for creativity and productivity.

The cubicle offers a space many employees consider “theirs”; it provides a place that blocks out noise and visual distractions while also being personal. Another benefit you may look over is the connectivity a cubicle can provide: cords and wires can run through or along the cubicle – a feat more difficult with certain open designs.

So Much Furniture

Whether you – and your employees – decide that an open concept is right for your office, any type of transition in furniture leads to yet another dilemma: what do you do with the cubicles and old furniture? That’s where we come in: we can disassemble and remove the old so you can make room for the new. Lansing Junk Removal offers discounts for furniture and fixtures we can donate or recycle, giving you additional peace of mind.

Taking On an Estate Cleanup: How We Can Help

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Making the decision of what to do with an estate you’ve inherited isn’t always an easy one. You have to decide whether to have an estate sale after the loss of a family member or to remove furniture and items from the property in other ways. Sometimes you have a bit of time to make the decision; other times, you need to work quickly for various reasons. Lansing Junk Removal can help with estate cleanup.

This process often involves family, emotions and sometimes hard decisions regarding what goes, what stays and who gets what.

Estate Sale

The thought of an estate sale may sound charming at first, but it’s not as simple as putting price tags on everything then hoping for the best. Successful estate sales are staged in a way that creates a retail-like environment for shoppers. Crystal and china are always clean, sparkling and on display.

Collections are displayed together, while furniture is often arranged in an inviting way – as it would be in your home. While there may be hundreds of items for sale, many successful estate sales have removed any clutter and trash from the premises before the sale. A smooth estate sale also leaves little room for confusion over items and prices. There are even companies specialized solely in estate sales – staging and effectively running the whole operation for you!

How We Can Help

We can help throughout this process – at the beginning or end. In the beginning, our trained and dedicated staff can come to the property with you, taking detailed notes regarding what you would like to keep and what you would like us to haul (don’t worry – if there’s an item we’re not sure about, we’ll ask!). This helps clear the way for you to sell some of the more valuable pieces and remove some of the items possibly disguising the value of others. At the end of an estate sale, we can gather what didn’t sell and haul it for you, opening up the property to a sale or whatever direction you and your family have decided on.

We can also assist if you don’t wish to have an estate sale. We know how difficult this process can be and offer a highly trained staff to help you through the decision of what needs to go and what stays. Whether you want us to take everything (and donate or recycle what we can), or you want to be there to catch any forgotten memories that may be hiding among the house, we can and will do that!

Commercial Junk Removal: Trusting the Pros to Help Eliminate Old Equipment and Furniture

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The need arises for every business – big or small – to clean house of furniture, machinery, office equipment or fixtures. Downsizing, upgrading or closing your doors to pursue new ventures all create a particular dilemma: what do I do with all this stuff? No matter what causes this need, our dedicated and trained team of professionals can assist you in disassembling and removing whatever items make the “cut” list. We are here to help with commercial junk removal.

Upgrades

Upgrading your office to new fixtures and furniture helps create an ideal working environment for you, employees and clients. Whether you feel your office is outdated or you’re looking to improve the functionality of your space, the old desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and cubicles are in the way of creating your ideal environment.

Machinery

New machinery may be in your sight to improve your business’ output. In many cases, however, you simply don’t have the room to install new machinery without first removing the old from your premises. We don’t stop at furniture: we’ll remove your old machinery!
While downsizing often has a negative connotation, that’s not always the case. Common reasons for downsizing include:

cutting costs
opening up your work area
creating a more efficient flow
closing your doors to pursue new opportunities

Savings

Lansing Junk Removal helps save time and money – both of which will boost your bottom line. While the thought of having your employees or yourself do the “heavy lifting” may be appealing, consider the time involved in disassembling and hauling furniture – time taken away from your everyday business. We have a professionally trained staff to come in and efficiently handle all aspects of this process, allowing you to quickly resume daily business without subjecting your business to the risk of lost time.

We’ll disassemble and remove furniture, including desks, seating, filing cabinets and shelves, as well as fixtures and most machinery. We can even get rid of those old cubicles! We offer quick service in most cases in the greater Lansing area, serving a 100-mile radius of the city. Our company is also dedicated to keeping as much out of the landfill as necessary; in fact, we recycle, repurpose or donate 80- to 90-percent of what we haul!

Connect with Lansing Junk Removal today to get started.