Junk Removal in West Springfield, MA

West Springfield is across the river to our southwest, and everyone here calls it West Side. It runs as a town despite having a mayor and a city form of government, and the legal name really is the Town of West Springfield.

A mix of housing that produces a mix of work

The older sections near the river and around Main Street are dense, with two families and smaller lots, and the work there looks like the rest of the valley: apartment clearances, cellars, single heavy items down a staircase.

Further out toward Mittineague and the higher ground the lots get bigger, the houses get newer, and the jobs change shape. Garages, sheds, above ground pools, playsets and hot tubs, which is a completely different mix from anything a downtown apartment produces.

September is its own season

The Big E runs seventeen days each September and brings well over a million people through town. Traffic on the roads near the grounds becomes a real factor, and anybody scheduling a truck in that stretch should plan around it rather than through it.

It cuts the other way too. Vendors, food operators and exhibitors generate a lot of material at the end of a run, and clean up work in the weeks after the fair is a genuine seasonal pattern here.

What comes up most

Garage clearances are the leading call in the suburban half of town. A two car garage that has been filling for a decade holds furniture, scrap steel, tires, a second refrigerator, paint and yard tools, and roughly a third of it cannot legally ride in the truck.

Outdoor work is the other pattern. Sheds that have gone soft, decks past their life, above ground pools that have not been opened in two summers, and playsets the children outgrew. All of it is demolition rather than hauling, and all of it separates by material at the gate because Massachusetts pulled wood, metal, brick and concrete out of disposal in 2006.

The riverfront and the flood control

The low ground near the Connecticut has flooded historically, which is why the dike is there. Houses in that stretch tend to have cellars that have taken water at some point, and a cellar that has been wet has a particular kind of contents: cardboard with no strength left, ruined furniture, and a lot of it resting on a damp slab.

Practical consequence: wet boxes travel as loose contents rather than getting lifted whole, which slows a clearance down. On the other side, mattresses and textiles contaminated by mold sit outside the state disposal ban under 310 CMR 19.006, so those pieces can be disposed of normally instead of going to a recycler.

One more thing about this stretch of town: a fair number of these houses have detached garages set back from the street, and that is where a decade of accumulation usually ends up. Garages here hold tires, a second refrigerator, steel shelving and paint, and the paint is the only part that cannot ride in the truck.

Access is easier here than most of the area

Most of the housing outside the old center has a driveway, which changes the economics. A truck at the door, a flat run to the garage or the yard, and no staircase means the same volume costs less than it would in a mill city apartment. It also makes a container a realistic option on longer projects, which it often is not on our side of the river.