Junk Removal in Cambridge, Ontario

Junk removal in Cambridge is heavier work than in most of the Region, because Cambridge has older houses, bigger properties and more industry. Galt's brick and limestone century homes have full basements, walk-up attics, coal rooms and summer kitchens, and when a long-time owner passes or moves into care, the estate fills a truck several times over. Preston and Hespeler were built for factory workers, and the post-war houses there have been renovated by two or three generations of handy owners who kept every offcut. The industrial and commercial side along Hespeler Road, Franklin Boulevard and the 401 corridor turns over units that leave racking, pallets, fixtures and forty desks behind. And south toward Ayr and Branchton the farm properties carry drive sheds and barns full of a century's worth of what might be useful someday. This is the booking line for one vetted, insured junk removal crew that does all of it. You send photos or a list, you get a firm number, and if it works the crew shows up, carries everything out, sorts it, and leaves you with an empty space. The number does not change unless the pile does, and if it does you hear about it before loading.

Galt's century homes and the estates inside them. The oldest housing in the Region is in Galt: brick and granite houses from the 1800s along the Grand River, up Dickson Hill and through West Galt, and the workers' cottages and semis on the streets east of Water Street. They were built with full basements, attics you can stand up in, and outbuildings, and they have been lived in by families who did not throw things away. An estate cleanout in one of these houses is the biggest single job this crew does. Furniture on three floors, a basement with a workshop and a preserving room, an attic of trunks and Christmas boxes, a garage that was a carriage house. The work is done room by room with the family or the executor, because an estate is not junk until someone has decided it is. Furniture in good condition goes to donation or to a dealer if the family wants; documents and photographs are set aside; and only after that does the rest go on the truck. The stairs are steep and the doorways are narrow, and the crew has done enough of these houses to know a piano does not come down the back stair.

Preston and Hespeler: post-war housing and the handy owner. Preston along King Street and the Speed River, and Hespeler around Queen Street and the old mills, grew up around factories, and the housing is a mix of pre-war workers' houses and post-war bungalows and storeys-and-a-half built for the people who worked in them. These houses have been renovated constantly, and usually by the owner. The basement has a workbench with fifty years of offcuts under it. The garage has two sets of tires, a snowblower that died in 2009, three ladders and the old kitchen cabinets that were going to become garage storage. The calls from Preston and Hespeler are basement and garage cleanouts, and increasingly renovation debris — the kitchen that came out last weekend, the drywall from a finished basement, the deck that was demolished and stacked by the fence. Those loads are heavy and they have to be sorted: clean wood, drywall, metal and general waste go to different places at the Region's facilities, and a crew that loads them as one pile pays for it at the scale and passes that on.

Hespeler Road, Franklin Boulevard and the 401 corridor. Cambridge is the industrial city of the Region. The plants and warehouses off Franklin, Bishop, Savage Drive, Boxwood and the business park north of the 401, the retail strip down Hespeler Road, and the older industrial buildings along the rivers in Galt and Preston all turn over tenants, and every turnover leaves something behind. Pallet racking, pallets, office furniture, retail fixtures, a lunchroom of appliances, broken shop equipment, a mezzanine of dead inventory. Commercial work is scheduled around the landlord's handover date and the building's rules — a loading dock, a shipping door, after-hours access, a certificate of insurance before anyone is allowed on site. The crew provides the paperwork and works the hours. It does not take industrial chemicals, oils, solvents or anything a licensed hazardous carrier should be handling, and it says so at the quote rather than at the dock.

Ayr, Branchton and the farms of North Dumfries. South and west of the city the Township of North Dumfries is farmland, and the village of Ayr and the hamlet of Branchton sit in it. Farm properties accumulate on a scale a city lot never does: a drive shed of implement parts, fencing wire and posts, tires, treated lumber, an old chest freezer kept for feed, the household junk of three generations stored in a barn because there was room. When a farm is sold or a family clears the homestead, the load is measured in trucks rather than in items. Farm properties also carry the things a junk crew cannot take: fuel, pesticides, old oil, treated seed, propane, and sometimes asbestos in an old outbuilding. The crew sorts those out and points the owner at the Region's hazardous waste program and, for asbestos, at a licensed abatement contractor. The distance is built into the quote before the truck leaves Cambridge, and one full truck is far cheaper than three half-full trips.

How the booking works, and what we ask you. Call or send the form. Useful details: the street or the unit, what kind of property it is — a Galt century home, a Preston bungalow, an industrial bay, a farm — roughly what is going, with photos where you can, whether there are stairs and how narrow they are, where the truck can park, and the date it needs to be gone by. For estates, say whether the family has already gone through the house or wants the crew to work with them room by room. For renovation debris, say what materials are in the pile. You get a firm number based on volume, weight and access. If the crew arrives and there is more than was described, they give you the revised number before loading it and you decide. Metal, electronics, appliances, clean wood, drywall and reusable furniture are separated from what goes to landfill. The crew is insured and WSIB-covered, and it is a haul-away service only: no bins, no moving to a new address, no hazardous materials.