Bed frame disposal in Philadelphia

The short answer

A frame alone at $68 falls under the $75 per-visit minimum, so on its own you would pay $75. In practice almost nobody removes a frame without the bed on it. A metal frame plus a queen mattress and box spring set is $68 + $143 = $211.

Which frame do you actually have?

The price splits on construction, not on how it looks, so it is worth being clear.

• Standard, metal or platform — $68. The folding steel frame on castors that a mattress set sits on. Flat-pack platform beds with slats. Anything that comes apart with an Allen key into a flat stack. This is most of Philadelphia's rental housing.
• Solid, upholstered or storage — $126 for twin, full and queen, $152 for king. Heavy timber beds, fabric-covered frames with a padded headboard, and storage beds with drawers built into the base. These do not flat-pack, they are heavy, and the base is one rigid piece.
• Adjustable base — $118. The motorised kind, with a mains lead and a hinge mechanism. Much heavier than it looks and awkward to carry because the weight shifts.

If you are unsure, the test is whether it comes apart into flat pieces. If it does, it is the $68 line.

The Philadelphia staircase question

This is the reason bed frames are a topic at all in this city rather than a footnote.

A flat-pack frame is fine. It comes apart in the room and goes down as a stack of slats, and even a trinity winder stair in Queen Village will take it.

A solid or upholstered frame is a different object. The base of a queen storage bed is a rigid rectangle roughly the size of the mattress, and a Philadelphia row-home staircase with a 90-degree turn at the landing will not pass a rigid rectangle of that size without a fight. A padded headboard is wider than the stairwell in a lot of houses.

Which is why people in this city routinely discover that the bed cannot leave the way it arrived. Usually because it was assembled upstairs, and nobody kept the Allen key. That work — taking it apart, or taking it down on its end, or getting it out through a second-floor window on a trinity — is included in the price. There is no stair charge and no walk-up charge.

The buying advice, for next time: in a row home or a trinity, a platform frame or a knock-down bed is worth choosing deliberately. So is a split box spring. It is the single most useful thing to know about furnishing Philadelphia housing stock.

Bunk beds and children's rooms

Philadelphia row homes are narrow, and a second or third bedroom in a two-up two-down is genuinely small, so bunk beds are common and loft beds are common in student rentals near Temple and Drexel.

A standard bunk bed is $123 and a solid wood or loft bunk is $148. With two twin mattresses that is $123 + $82 + $82 = $287.

Bunks almost always come apart — they were assembled in the room because they physically could not be carried up otherwise. Loft beds in student houses are frequently a different story: home-built platforms screwed into the room, sometimes into the wall. Say so at booking if that is what you have, because the crew will arrive with the right tools rather than finding out.

A crib is $67. Same situation, same reason: assembled in a small back bedroom on the second floor.

Pricing the whole bed, not just the frame

Nobody has only a frame. Here are three real Philadelphia bedrooms with the arithmetic shown.

Student rental off Cecil B. Moore. Metal frame $68 + twin mattress $82 = $150. Add the desk at $83 and it is $150 + $83 = $233.

Main bedroom in a Fairmount row home. Solid queen frame $126 + mattress and box spring set $143 = $269.

King bed in a Chestnut Hill twin. King frame $152 + king mattress $114 + box spring $92 = $358.

If a whole bedroom is going — bed, dresser, nightstands, the lot — it may be simpler to price by volume. A quarter truck is $241 and a three-eighths load is $338.

Can you just put a frame at the curb?

A disassembled metal frame is about the most curb-friendly thing in this article — it is compact, it is all steel, and in Philadelphia a stack of steel on a pavement tends not to last long before somebody with a pickup truck takes it for scrap.

But check your collection day and the current bulk-item guidance on the city's site before relying on it, and count your pieces honestly: a bed is a frame, a mattress and a box spring, which is three items, and item limits are a real thing.

Do not put out an upholstered frame or a storage base and hope. They are large, they soak up rain, and once one is sitting on a narrow row-home pavement for three days other people start adding to it.

What to do before the visit

• Strip the bedding. It is not going on the truck as part of the frame, and a bag of clothes and linen is $35 if you want it taken too.
• Leave assembly alone unless you want to. Dismantling is part of the job.
• Empty storage drawers in a storage bed. They are usually full and nobody remembers.
• Unplug an adjustable base and note where the lead runs.
• Tell us the floor and the stair type at booking. "Third floor, trinity" gets the right crew.

Frequently asked questions