Estimated Read Time: 5 mins
Do you love thrifting in your free time and filling your maximalist home with antique treasures? Have you ever tackled a “simple” room makeover or a full renovation on your own? Often find yourself elbow deep in glue working on your latest DIY home decor idea?
If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, chances are, we’d be great friends! It also means that, like me, you’re probably drowning in the aftermath of your creative endeavors and you’re usually too overwhelmed by (or too excited for) your next big project to spend the time tackling all that clutter and trash you’ve built up around you. Well, folks, you’re not alone!
This is exactly where my husband, Joe, and I have found ourselves time and time again after years of remodeling and redecorating our home just the two of us. But with our first baby on the way, we finally got the push we needed to clear the junk…the only problem was…this was one house project we really didn’t want to do ourselves.
When Your Creativity Catches Up With You
As a full-time content creator with a passion for DIY , a home full of pets, a barn full of sheep, and a husband who has as many crafty hobbies as I do, it genuinely feels like we are constantly surrounded by trash–pure chaos, really. Boxes come to the house at a shameful rate for the work I do. Piles of wood scraps from our many past and ongoing projects haphazardly surround the work shed. Empty bags of animal feed have stacked so high, you’d think we were saving them up to knit a quilt with. Holiday party props I once spent hours creating now rot against our fence. Broken down furniture I’ve decided I no longer want has taken over our property. The list of offenses goes on.
Up to this point, most of it has been thrown into a gigantic heap of garbage and debris in our driveway that we not-so-lovingly refer to as “Trash Mountain.” That’s right. Not hiding behind the barn or somewhere out of sight. IN THE DRIVEWAY. This mound of shame is something we have to walk past multiple times a day. It’s something we have to see from our windows. It’s the first thing visitors see when they pull up to our home. It’s…embarrassing.
And that’s just the outside!
Inside the house, we’ve bounced around from one room makeover to the next without actually finishing the first one for so long that almost every room has become a “catch-all room” for tools, old furniture,, and the items we’ve had to move from one room to the other to work on the project(s) at hand in said room. Let’s face it…if all the rooms are catch-all rooms, it’s no longer the proper term. It’s simply just a messy, disorganized house. That’s no place for a couple of new parents to bring a baby home to, especially when there’s no nursery because it’s currently filled with stuff that we need to get rid of before we can even start renovating it.
With my due date fast approaching, we had to do something.
Knowing When To Ask For Help
As diehard DIYers, it’s almost unheard of for us to hire out for any of our home projects. But with my husband and I both currently working our busiest season at our full-time jobs, visiting with family for the holidays, planning a baby shower, and *growing* a baby, we couldn’t wait to call in reinforcements for this one! That’s when we booked our local 1-800-GOT-JUNK? team here in Massachusetts.
They came out the same day at a time that worked best in our schedule and even called ahead to discuss our junk removal needs and goals for the afternoon. I mentioned on the phone that we were prepping for baby, and 20 minutes later, two of the kindest men we have ever met pulled up to our house in that big blue truck with hot chocolate for this sweets-craving momma-to-be AND a box of newborn diapers in hand. Blame it on the hormones but the way they went above and beyond for us brought me to tears!
1-800-GOT-JUNK? Truly Does It All
Upon their arrival, the team did a walk-through of the property with us to get a full sense of what we were hoping to remove. They gave us a quote on the spot, priced by volume, and explained their process for removal and sorting, as well as their commitment to recycling the recyclables and donating the donate-ables. As someone who has turned their love of salvaging old things into a career (and as someone who has a hard time letting go of her things), knowing that my “trash” would serve as “treasure” to someone else or to the planet was honestly the number one selling point for me in hiring 1-800-GOT-JUNK? for this clean-up.
The other main bonus, of course, is that we didn’t have to lift a finger! Well, except to point at whatever we wanted gone. You point, they take it away. It really was that easy. After showing the team a second-floor room filled with old mattresses and an insanely heavy wood dresser, they carried everything down the stairs for us, out the front door, and all the way around the house to the truck as my husband and I sat back admiring the finally-empty-room that will soon become our baby girl’s nursery.
We met back up with the guys in the driveway to help them chip away at Trash Mountain (and by “help,” I mean watch, because they wouldn’t let us help even if we tried). They were adamant that all we had to do was stand by and relax for once as they did all the heavy lifting and the dirty work for us. I can’t quite explain to you the foul smell that was stirred up as they dug through the pile of debris that had been sitting in the New England weather for the past year or two but I CAN tell you how relieved I was to be able to walk away from it and just have it disappear within minutes.
With the truck nearly at full capacity from the driveway junk pile and vintage dresser alone, we feared the mattresses might not fit after all that, but our team was DETERMINED to leave nothing left behind! In the most impressive display of spatial planning I have ever seen, they squeezed all five mattresses into the mere 2-3 feet remaining in the back of the truck. The celebration of this victory (seen in our video of the experience) was one for the books! So, yeah…pretty epic junk removal, if I do say so myself.
Hiring Out Was SO Worth It
As I’ve said already, we don’t typically hire out for the projects we do around our home—big or small. If we can do it ourselves and save some money, that’s what we’re gonna choose to do 99% of the time. This time felt different. This was our 1% scenario, and it was 100% worth it! We COULD technically (maybe?) have done it ourselves, but at 6 months pregnant, I really, really didn’t want to. And I’m sure my husband and my doctor wouldn’t advise me putting that kind of stress on my body right now either. Despite wanting and needing the help for this one, I was personally still hesitant simply due to the fact that I was mortified by the thought of anyone seeing how gross our home had become, and by the thought of imposing this big job onto someone else.
I can confidently say that all those worries melted away within seconds of our team arriving. Their positive attitude and high energy was so genuine, so infectious, so…comforting. They made our junk and our stress disappear, all with smiles on their faces the whole time, cracking jokes and making us laugh through the entire visit as they cleaned up the giant mess we had made over the years. It really was a wonderful distraction from the embarrassment I was feeling about the state of our home. They genuinely made us feel like they were there as friends, happy to help. That level of kindness and support really confirmed that we had made the right decision calling on them for this daunting task.
Clean Slate. Fresh Start. Now What?
Now that the junk pile is gone and the room where old mattresses go to die is finally empty, we’re ready to kick this whole “nesting” thing into high gear—getting even more organized in preparation for baby, finding a more appropriate solution than Trash Mountain 2.0 for the influx of boxes as baby shower gifts roll in, and best of all, beginning our highly anticipated nursery renovation!
As for our new favorite junk removal service? We’re already looking forward to having the team back in the spring to help us get rid of this neglected DIY stock tank pool ugly-ing up our backyard.
