Why licensed and insured matters more than price in Indianapolis

The short answer

Junk removal is two people carrying heavy objects through your house and then disposing of them on your behalf. Both halves carry risk that lands on you if the company is not properly covered.

Flat prices here are published — sofa $126, queen mattress $103, refrigerator $164, half truck load $431 — so you can compare on number and on cover at the same time. The point of this article is that the number is the easy part.

What can go wrong on the way out of an Indianapolis house

Our housing stock is old and the finishes are unforgiving.

• Plaster and lath. The pre-war houses across Irvington, Meridian-Kessler, Herron-Morton, Fountain Square and the near northside have plaster walls, not drywall. A dresser corner into plaster does not make a dent you can fill with a tub of compound — it cracks a section and the repair is a plasterer.
• Original stair rails and newel posts. A hundred-year-old newel post is a structural part of the stair, and it is exactly what a sofa pivots against on the way down.
• Hardwood floors. Original oak in a foursquare, refinished at some cost, and a washer dragged rather than carried across it leaves a permanent mark.
• Storm doors and door casings. Almost every removal in this city passes through a narrow doorway with a storm door that swings outward.
• Driveways and lawns. A loaded truck on a soft lawn after an Indiana spring leaves ruts, and a truck on an old driveway slab can crack it.

An insured company's general liability cover is what pays for those. An uninsured one offers you an apology.

The injury question, which is the big one

If someone is hurt carrying your chest freezer up your basement stairs, the question of who is responsible gets answered by paperwork you did not read.

A company with proper workers' compensation coverage handles that internally. A crew working uninsured, or a couple of people with a pickup found through an ad, can end up looking to the homeowner's policy — and a homeowner's policy is not designed to cover people you paid to do labor on your property.

This is the single largest financial exposure in a job that costs a couple of hundred dollars, and it is invisible until it happens.

Where your junk ends up is still your problem

This surprises people. If you pay someone to remove your furniture and they leave it on a vacant lot on the near east side or a rural roadside in Hancock County, the investigation starts with whatever has an address on it — and that is your mail, your delivery labels, your boxes.

Illegal dumping is an offense under Indiana law with local penalties on top. Explaining that you paid someone else to take it away is not a defense you want to be constructing.

A licensed operator disposes at permitted facilities and can tell you where. That is worth more than a twenty-dollar saving.

Buildings and associations that will not let an uninsured crew in

Even if you are relaxed about it, somebody else may not be.

Downtown buildings around Mass Ave, Loccurbie and the canal, and most managed apartment complexes, require a certificate of insurance on file before a contractor uses the freight elevator or the loading dock. No certificate, no elevator, and your Saturday move-out slot is gone.

Plenty of HOA communities in Fishers, Carmel, Westfield, Zionsville and Center Grove have the same requirement for work on common property or for anything using a shared drive. And if you are a landlord or a property manager, your own insurer may well require that vendors carry cover — a claim from an uninsured contractor is a fast way to find out.

The no-show problem

Less dramatic and far more common. An unlicensed operator with no dispatch system and one truck cancels when the truck breaks, when the weather turns, or when a better-paying job appears.

That is an inconvenience on a Tuesday and a genuine cost when it is the day before a closing, the morning of a final walkthrough, or the last day of a lease at the end of July when the whole metro is turning over and nobody else has a slot. The cheapest quote is worth nothing at 4pm on the day it does not arrive.

What to actually ask for

Four questions, and you can ask all of them in one message:

• Do you carry general liability, and can you send a certificate? A real operator produces it without friction. Ask for it named to your address or your building if the building requires it.
• Do you carry workers' compensation for the crew? This is the one people forget and it matters most.
• Where do you dispose? The answer should be a permitted facility, and they should be able to say so plainly.
• Is the price fixed, and is disposal included? A written, fixed number before the truck arrives tells you a lot about how the company runs generally.

The arithmetic

Put a number on it. A sofa removal is $126. A washer and dryer pair is $133 + $128 = $261. A half truck load is $431.

Against that: a cracked plaster wall in an older Indianapolis house is a plasterer's day plus paint. A refinished-floor repair is a floor sander. A cracked driveway apron is concrete work. An illegal dumping citation is a fine plus the cost of the removal you already paid for once.

Nobody is suggesting you overpay. The published prices are the published prices, and you should compare them against anyone. The suggestion is that a saving of twenty or thirty dollars is not the variable that decides whether this job goes well.

Frequently asked questions