Month: November 2018

 

Nobody wants to move during the holiday season. You’d probably prefer to be decorating your home and enjoying some close family time rather than worrying about packing and relocating. But sometimes it’s necessary. If you need to move over the holidays, here are some helpful tips to ensure you have a merry move.

Plan Early

Even though the holidays aren’t the busiest moving season, moving companies get booked up in advance. As soon as you know your move date, place your reservation with your moving company of choice. Look at holiday traffic patterns and try to avoid moving during peak travel days around the holidays.

Put Aside Money

Budgets can be stretched already with holiday spending. Once you know you’re going to move over the holidays, start setting aside money for things like the moving costs, utility hookups and other expenses associated with moving.

Pack Smart

Since you’ll be arriving at your new home in the midst of the holidays, clearly mark boxes filled with presents and holiday décor to open first. Then deck the halls! That will bring some of the holiday spirit into your new house and help you to feel more at home with your treasured ornaments and decorations around you. There will be some sadness in not celebrating your usual traditions in your former home. To help relieve the pressure of a holiday move, don’t feel as if you have to go all out on your holiday decorating or celebrations this year. Instead, talk about your favorite traditions and try to establish some new ones.

Purge

Moving over the holidays is a great time to purge the items you no longer need, use or want. Consider donating these items to a local charity to recycle them back into families who need them. Get a receipt for anything you donate and deduct that donation on your taxes next year. Contact 123JUNK to pick up donated as well as disposed-of items.

Prepare for Weather

One thing you can’t control is the weather-especially if you are moving over the holidays into a colder climate. Keep items like boots, hats, gloves and snow shovels on hand just in case you need them. When you arrive at your destination, be sure to clear walkways and stairways if snow or ice are present. You don’t want your family members or the movers to have an accident while moving. Make sure the heat and electricity are turned on in your new home prior to your arrival.

Party

Once you’ve arrived at your new home, don’t forget to enjoy the holidays. Plan a little “moving in” party for the family to celebrate the new home. You’ll be creating plenty of new traditions and new memories in your new house, so why not start right away?

123JUNK Helps with Moves Over the Holidays

Our goal at 123JUNK is to make your move easier—no matter what time of the year. We make it so easy that you don’t even have to sort items you’re looking to get rid of. Just make one pile and point us to it. Our junk removal specialists will take everything at once and sort it for you, dividing out items to deliver to our charity partners, items to take to the recycling center, and those to drop at the local landfill. Then we’ll provide you with a receipt for donated goods and furnishings that you can use on next year’s tax deductions.

When you’re moving over the holidays, contact 123JUNK.

We have to laugh when people automatically assume that 123JUNK is a national company—or a franchise of a national company. We are not! We are locally-founded and owned company serving business and home owners throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

We like to think that this “reputation” of being a national company comes from our commitment to professionalism that can be found in every aspect, every niche and every corner of our business. Here are just some of the ways 123JUNK serves clients like a national company:

Commitment to our Core Values

123JUNK established 40 Core Values, the company culture by which we do business. Each and every potential employee is familiarized with these Core Values and asked if they can commit to them. If they cannot, they are not hired. These Core Values are so important to our company that they are “etched in stone” (well, plastic), and mounted on our office walls and reviewed regularly in our staff meetings. They include items like “making sure the client is satisfied,” “being accountable,” “helping our neighbors,” “setting standards,” and “serving as an example.”

Clear Career Path

123JUNK put into place a clear career path for anyone wishing to join our team. Although we have a rigorous hiring process and we require each new team member to start on the trucks in order to learn the business from the ground up, interested and qualified individuals can move up quickly through the ranks. We like to put people into jobs they are both interested in and good at because then we get happy employees who can reflect that satisfaction to our clients.

Job Well Done

We take great pride in our business and require our team to maintain a clean uniform, a clean office (paperless!) and clean trucks. We think a shiny truck shows the quality of work we will do at your home or office. When we do a job for you, we take careful measures to ensure that no damage is done to your property while removing junk. We line the floors and protect walls and corners, for example, and broom sweep the space when we’re done.

Hyper-Local Commitment

One thing that is very important to us is giving back to our own community. We are focused on supporting our local charity partners by donating items from our pickups to both recycle them back into the community to families who can use them, and helping to raise funds for those charities through the sales of those items. We also focus our attention on local events, participating in local parades and recycling events, and using one of our trucks for the Kid’s Pull at the annual Dulles Plane Pull to support Special Olympics, for example.

Careful Growth

Like a national company, 123JUNK wants to grow. But we are careful not to grow too fast. We think it is more important to ensure top quality junk hauling and junk removal services first. We opened our second location in Gaithersburg, Maryland in January 2017 only when customer demand required it, and that allows us to even better serve our clients in Maryland, with more local service and quicker response times.

Founding of Local Junk Hauling Company 123JUNK

123JUNK was founded  by a then-23-year-old Collin Wheeler just over 10 years ago after realizing, as a sales rep for a moving company, that people did not want to pay to move items they no longer wanted to keep. He thought he could offer a stress-free way to help people and used his meager savings to buy an old, beat-up dump truck. He hired his brother and his teen-age friends to work on the trucks and the business was born.

In 2018, 123JUNK celebrated our 10^th anniversary as a local junk hauling company, thanks to the strong team, collaborative partners, and solid client relationships we’ve built throughout the years. We look forward to our future growth and service to residents of Maryland, Northern Virginia, and Washington D.C.

If you need junk hauling, junk removal, cleanout or labor-only services, contact your LOCAL junk removal company: 123JUNK.

 

Do you have a shed in your backyard that is unsightly? Is it falling down? Is it leaking? Is there water damage on the walls?  If so, it might be time to shed that shed.

There are a number of reasons people keep old sheds in their yards. They may be still using them to store lawn equipment and tools, but wish they had a nicer shed in its place. They may have relegated the shed to an outside storage area, never to be entered again. Or they may just put it off as one of those “someday” projects.

That’s where 123JUNK comes to the rescue.  We love to tear down old sheds and take them away.

Let 123JUNK Help You Remove Your Shed

Our team members are trained in the proper and safe way to take down and remove an old shed, whether it is a wood shed, a metal shed, a brick shed, a cinder block shed, or any other kind. We’ll dismantle the shed, making sure to clear the area entirely of nails and debris, and haul it away completely. Usually in one afternoon.

You don’t have to risk physical harm or strain your back tearing down and removing your old shed when 123JUNK is simply a phone call away. Call us today to get a quick, all-inclusive quote.

Old Sheds Can Be Dangerous

An old shed is not only unsightly, it can be dangerous. It can leak, causing damage to your belongings inside it. This water can also lead to unhealthy mold. Your old shed can also be a safety hazard for both adults and children, especially if it is in danger of collapsing.

Shed Cleanout Service

If you’d like to keep your shed, but have been dreading cleaning it out, we can help here too. We’ll help take out everything in your shed and sweep it clean. Then you decide what goes back into the shed and what needs to go. We’ll load up everything you no longer want or need and take it away for you. We can also clean up yard waste and brush to leave you with a beautiful landscape.

We’ll donate any yard equipment or tools that can be repurposed, take recyclable materials to the recycling center, and only then drop off the remainder to the local disposal facility. Please note that, by law, we cannot haul hazardous materials, however, like chemicals, solvents or fuels.

The Many Services of 123JUNK

Shed removal is just one of the many services offered by 123JUNK in Northern Virginia, Washington DC and Maryland. Please call us for junk removal, furniture & appliance removal, clean outs, yard waste & debris removal, or simply labor-only services.

Imagine how good your yard will look with a new shed in the place of your old, unsightly one. We can help make that happen. All you have to do is give 123JUNK a call today.

Did you know that 8.96% of American households currently rents a self-storage unit? And that 67% of those who do live in single-family homes with most having a garage and 33% having a basement in their homes?

Other statistics show that the majority of these self-storage users rent for the long term—more than 52% rented it for a year or more, reports the Self Storage Association.

If you have a self-storage unit, or have friends who do, think about how often you or they access it? Probably not too often, if ever. That means you’re not only paying to purchase items you do not need or use, you are paying a hefty fee each month just to hold on to them. So what does this mean?  We have too much stuff!

That’s where 123JUNK comes in.

What to do before you rent a self-storage unit

Before you start thinking about renting a self-storage unit, take a hard assessment of the items you want to store there. Are you storing family antiques that you will be passing along to the next generation? Do you have equipment or files relating to a business you own or run that you need to store off premises? These are great reasons to rent a self-storage unit.

On the other hand, have your piles of boxes outgrown the basement and attic storage areas? Can you even get your car into the garage anymore? Many people keep accumulating items because they think, “I will use it someday.” And then those piles become overwhelming and difficult to deal with. So they just pile up, higher and higher, leaving you saying to yourself, “I ought to do something about that” but then never having the time or energy to do so.

The rule of thumb is: If you haven’t used it in a year, you probably won’t need to. Cull through your stuff and see what you can really let go of before it gets to the point where you need a self-storage unit. Then call 123JUNK to come haul it away. We will not just drive to the landfill and dump it off. We carefully go through each pickup to pull out anything that can be repurposed or recycled, and provide you with a donation receipt you can use against your taxes.

What to do after you’ve rented a self-storage unit

If you have already rented a self-storage unit and want to clean it out, we can do that too. You can sort through items or just have us take the whole kit and caboodle, doing the same culling process to pull out perfectly re-usable or re-purposely items.

It’s good to know that you can just pick up the telephone and arrange for someone else to do the heavy lifting. We’ll send over a professional 123JUNK team and one of our big red dump trucks, and clear that storage unit out in a jiffy. No more monthly charges for items that are only collecting dust.

Plus, you’ll feel good about donating items to someone that can really use them. 123JUNK works with a number of charitable organizations who would be thrilled to get your donations.

If this isn’t enough to get you motivated to clear out that excess stuff, let us leave you with this last statistic. According to the Self Storage Association, the contents of more than 155,000 self-storage units are auctioned off annually for an average price of $425 from people who simply abandon them and quit paying the self-storage fees. That amounts to more than $65 million going into the pockets of the self-storage owners from people who couldn’t deal with their stuff any longer.

Have too much stuff? Contact 123JUNK.

This doesn’t have to be you, with 123JUNK as an option. To avoid the hassle of self-storage and high self-storage fees, call 123JUNK today. We serve families and businesses throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

 

Since we’re largely a referral-based business, we rely heavily on customer feedback, reviews, and recommendations to drive new business. Here are some of the most common sites where people post feedback about their 123JUNK Experience;

Yelp! – a site that allows users to post reviews about goods and services. Reviews are thoroughly filtered, so if you aren’t a regular user, yours may not show up!

Google – Formerly Google Places, Google+ gives clients an area to post reviews, similar to Yelp! and other review sites. These reviews show up even if it’s a first-time review. If you don’t give regular website feedback, this is probably your best choice.

Facebook – Anyone with an account can “like” our page and comment on the services they received.

Angie’s List – this site is members only, but it’s a great way for our Angie’s List customers to share their experiences with other customers.

We tailor our customer service experience around the wants and needs of our customers. That means that improvements to our systems are dependent on sincere feedback from our clients. The more we know about what we’re doing right (or wrong), the better we can cater to the desires of our customers.