Deep basements and steep stairs: getting junk out of a Minneapolis bungalow

The short answer

There is no stair charge. Not for a basement, not for a half-story bedroom, not for a third-floor walk-up.

A sofa out of a Powderhorn basement is $126. A treadmill is $115. A chest freezer is $146. A washer is $133 and a dryer is $128. A queen mattress and box spring set is $143. The minimum per visit is $75.

That is worth saying plainly because in this city the stairs are the entire reason people call. The item is not heavy in an abstract sense — it is heavy relative to a 32-inch-wide run of 1920s stairs with a ninety-degree turn at the bottom against a limestone wall.

What a Minneapolis basement staircase is actually like

Walk into almost any story-and-a-half through Nokomis, Standish, Hiawatha, Field, Regina, Bancroft or Keewaydin, or a four-square in Longfellow or Kingfield, and the basement stair is remarkably consistent:

• Narrow. Built to a standard from a period when furniture was smaller and nobody owned a sectional.
• Steep. A taller rise and a shallower tread than anything built after 1960.
• Turned. Very often a landing and a hard right or left at the bottom, tight against block or limestone foundation wall.
• Low. Ductwork, the main drain stack, and the beam frequently run under seven feet at the foot of the stairs.
• Doored. A door at the top that opens inward onto a small landing, sometimes off the kitchen, with nowhere to stand while you swing it.

Every one of those is fine going down with two optimistic people in 2011. Coming up is a different exercise.

The pieces that are genuinely hard to get out

In rough order of how often they defeat a homeowner:

• Sleeper sofas. $149. The steel frame makes them rigid and roughly twice the weight of a normal couch. The single most common thing stuck in a Minneapolis basement.
• Box springs. $92 on their own, or $143 as a set with the mattress. They do not flex. A queen box spring will not turn a corner a mattress goes around easily.
• Treadmills. $115. Heavy, with a center of gravity in the wrong place, and the frame usually does not fold small enough to matter.
• Chest freezers. $146. Frequently under the stairs, and the spot under the stairs is the hardest spot in the house to get anything out of.
• Home gyms and multi-station racks. $241. These get assembled in the basement and were never designed to leave it whole.
• Old CRT televisions. $62 under 42 inches. Genuinely 150 to 200 pounds of leaded glass on a staircase.
• Pool tables. $603. Slate, in sections, assembled in the room.

How crews get these out without wrecking your house

Mostly by disassembly and protection, not by force.

Sofas come apart more than people realize — legs off, back panel off on many frames, and on older ones the back and seat separate entirely. Sleeper mechanisms get unbolted. Treadmills lose the console and the uprights. Home gyms come out as a pile of bars.

Then the stairwell gets protected: corner guards on the plaster, the handrail covered or temporarily removed, and a runner on the treads. Plaster corners in a 1925 house do not bounce back from a knock the way drywall does, and a stairwell in a Minneapolis bungalow is usually plaster over lath.

The disassembly is part of the job, not an add-on. A sleeper sofa is $149 whether it walks out in one piece or comes up in four.

The basement door and the bulkhead question

People often ask whether the outside basement entrance helps. Sometimes.

A fair number of homes in this city have an exterior stairwell down to a basement door, usually on the side or back of the house toward the alley. Where one exists it is often the better route — fewer turns and no interior plaster to protect.

Two caveats specific to here. The opening is frequently narrower than the interior stair, since it was cut for coal delivery or for access rather than for furniture. And from December through March that stairwell is a snow trap: it fills, it drifts over, and the door at the bottom freezes into the frame.

If you have one, say so when you book. If it is full of snow, say that too.

What the whole basement costs, not just the one item

Most of these calls turn out to be a room, not a piece. Volume pricing usually wins:

Worked examples: Rec room in Hiawatha. Sleeper sofa $149 + treadmill $115 + entertainment center $96 = $360. Storage side of a Longfellow basement. Chest freezer $146 + large junk pile $208 + box of books $45 = $399. Whole basement of a bungalow. Usually three-quarters to a full truck, $587 to $732.

You get quoted the item total and the volume total and you pay the lower. Neither number moves because of the stairs.

What to set aside before the crew comes

Minneapolis basements hold a predictable shelf of things that cannot go in the truck:

• Paint and stain. Usually a lot of it, and usually including cans that froze at some point and separated. Hennepin County household hazardous waste drop-off.
• Solvents, thinner, old pesticides, pool chemicals. Same place.
• Fuel. Gas cans for the mower or the snowblower.
• Propane cylinders. Including the small camping ones that accumulate on a workbench.

Everything else in a typical basement is fine — furniture, appliances, boxes, decades of holiday decorations, the shelving somebody built in 1974, and whatever is behind it.

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