Junk Removal in Wilbraham, MA

Wilbraham has 14,613 people spread across a large, hilly, largely residential town east of Springfield. The land rises to Wilbraham Mountain, lots are generous, and a lot of the housing sits on slopes with walkout basements and long driveways.

The 2011 tornado is still part of the landscape

On 1 June 2011 a tornado tracked across this part of the state, through Springfield, Wilbraham and Monson, and it took down an enormous amount of tree cover. Fifteen years on, the rebuilt sections of town and the changed treeline are still visible, and property owners here have a longer memory than most for what a storm can do.

That is more than history for this work. Storm debris is a real and recurring job in Wilbraham, and the practical advice after any big weather event is the same: if nothing is blocking a driveway or leaning on a building, waiting a couple of weeks usually gets both a better price and a faster slot, because everybody in the area calls in the same three days.

Brush is priced by volume, not weight

Yard waste has been off the Massachusetts disposal list since the early nineties, so brush goes to composting or chipping rather than a landfill. It is priced by the space it takes in a truck, and brush is mostly air, which means a pile that looks enormous is often a half truck.

It also means cutting branches down to shorter lengths before a truck arrives genuinely lowers the bill, which is not true of most jobs. Stumps are a different matter and most haulers will not take them, because the root ball holds soil and stone that destroys a chipper. Stump grinding is its own trade.

Hillside houses, walkout basements

The slope is an advantage here. A walkout basement or a bulkhead gives a straight run to a truck with no interior stairs and no turns, and crews strongly prefer it to carrying everything up through the house. If you have one, say so when you call, because it can change the quote.

Long driveways are the counterweight. Mention it if yours is long, steep or unpaved, particularly after a wet spell. A loaded truck that cannot get back out is a bigger problem than any single item in it.

Garages, barns and outbuildings

With lots this size, storage is not limited to the house. Detached garages, barns and outbuildings hold decades of tools, machinery, building materials, tires and metal. Metal lowers the price of a load because it goes to scrap. Tires raise it, at roughly $5 to $20 each, because whole tires have been banned from Massachusetts landfills since 1991 and have to be shredded.

What cannot go, and it is usually in the garage

Paint, motor oil, antifreeze, solvents, pesticides, fertilizer and propane cylinders are household hazardous waste. No hauler takes them and a transfer station will reject a load with them mixed in. They go to the town's collection day instead, so pull them into one corner before a crew arrives.

Sealed pressure vessels are the other one. A propane tank, an oxygen or acetylene cylinder, or an old fuel oil tank cannot be moved until it has been purged and certified empty, and no scrap yard will take one either.

The school and the seasons

Wilbraham and Monson Academy is a boarding school, which gives the town a smaller version of the college turnover the rest of the valley gets. It is nothing like the scale of Amherst, but the end of the academic year is a busier week here than the ones around it.

The bigger seasonal factor is weather. Spring cleaning and post storm brush are the two things that fill a hauler's calendar in this town, and both are worth booking a few days ahead rather than on the morning.