Bed frame disposal in San Francisco

What it costs

Published flat prices. Disassembly, carry-out from any floor and disposal are all included:

• Bed Frame (Standard / Metal / Platform): $68
• Bed Frame (Solid / Upholstered / Storage) — Twin / Full / Queen: $126
• Bed Frame (Solid / Upholstered / Storage) — King / Cal King: $152
• Headboard on its own: $57
• Bunk Bed: $123  |  Bunk Bed — Solid Wood / Loft: $148
• Trundle Bed: $100  |  Daybed: $89  |  Crib: $67
• Murphy Bed (Wall Bed): $130
• Adjustable Bed Base (Motorized): $118
• Waterbed: $167

San Francisco's visit minimum is $95. A standard metal frame at $68 on its own prices as a $95 visit — which is why frames almost always go out with the mattress rather than alone.

The combinations that actually get booked:

• Queen mattress and a metal platform frame: $103 + $68 = $171.
• Mattress and box spring set with a solid queen frame: $143 + $126 = $269.
• King mattress and a solid king frame: $114 + $152 = $266.
• Bunk bed and two twin mattresses from a child's room: $123 + $82 + $82 = $287.
• Whole guest room — queen mattress, box spring, solid frame and a nightstand: $103 + $92 + $126 + $57 = $378.

Which category is your frame?

The price splits on construction, not on brand.

Standard / metal / platform ($68). A steel bed frame, a wire or slatted platform base, a simple flat-pack timber platform with no storage. These come apart into flat components and are light.

Solid, upholstered or storage ($126 twin to queen, $152 king). Hardwood frames with a proper headboard and footboard, upholstered beds with a padded surround, and any frame with drawers built into the base. These are heavy, they rarely come apart cleanly, and upholstered ones cannot be broken down at all without cutting.

The storage-drawer variety is the one that catches San Francisco households out. People buy them because our flats have no cupboard space, and then discover that a queen storage base is a single rigid box roughly the size of the bedroom door frame it needs to pass through.

The stair is the whole difficulty

A bed frame is long, rigid and wide. A San Francisco stair is narrow, straight and turns onto a small landing halfway. The two do not agree.

The standard layout in a Victorian or Edwardian flat is: bedroom on the upper floor, full flight down to a landing, ninety-degree turn, half-flight down to the front door, and out. A king headboard does not make that turn without coming to pieces. Nor does a solid queen footboard. This is not a hypothetical — it is what the crew plans for before they knock.

Which is why the price includes disassembly. We bring the tools to take bolts out, and where a bolt is seized or a joint is glued, we cut. There is no charge for that and there is no stair charge either; a frame is $68, $126 or $152 whether it is on the ground floor in the Bayview or three flights up in Russian Hill.

It is also why we do not recommend doing this one yourself in an upper flat. A bed frame carried down a narrow stair by one person is how stairwell walls get gouged, and in a rented flat that comes out of a deposit.

Murphy beds and the small-flat problem

San Francisco has an unusually high density of wall beds, for the obvious reason: a lot of our flats are small and a lot of our households have turned a dining room into a bedroom or built out an in-law unit.

A Murphy bed is a different animal from a normal frame. It is bolted to the wall, sometimes to the floor, and it contains either heavy springs or gas struts under serious tension. It must be unloaded properly before it is unbolted — releasing a wall bed mechanism carelessly is genuinely dangerous.

Our price is $130, including taking it off the wall and out of the flat. Two things to know:

• There will be fixings and often blocking left in the wall. We remove the bed, not the plasterwork; patching is a decorator's job.
• If it is built into a joinery surround — a bookcase or cabinet unit around the bed — tell us at booking, because the surround is separate furniture and prices as such. A solid wood bookcase is $123 and a flat-pack one is $100.

What about donating the frame?

Worth trying for solid hardwood frames in good condition with all their hardware. Worth skipping for everything else, and here is the honest test.

• Flat-pack timber. It was assembled once. Cam locks and dowel joints in particleboard do not survive a second assembly, and charities know this.
• Missing hardware. A frame with no bolts is not a frame. If the bag of fixings has been gone for six years, it is not a donation.
• Upholstered. Fabric frames are declined as often as used mattresses.
• Anything that has been in a garage. Our damp gets into timber joints and into upholstery. A frame stored under the house for two winters is not what it was.

And the San Francisco caveat that applies to every donation plan here: almost all collection is curbside, so you are still carrying it down. If you cannot get it to the pavement, the donation route has already ended.

What not to do with it

Do not put it on the pavement without a collection booked. Unarranged bulky items on a San Francisco footway are illegal dumping and enforcement follows the address it came out of — which, for a departing tenant, means it comes back through the building owner.

Bed frames are a particularly bad candidate for the informal free pile, too. Nobody takes a disassembled bed frame off a curb; it is a pile of components with no obvious completeness, and it does not look like a gift. It looks like exactly what it is.

If you want the city's collection, check San Francisco's current bulky-item page for what is eligible and how far ahead to book, and set it out only inside the window you are given.

Booking it sensibly

Two practical notes.

Book the frame with the mattress. One visit, one minimum, and the bedroom is finished in one go. Splitting them across two visits means paying two minimums for no reason.

Time it against the new bed. If a new bed is being delivered, get the old one out first. San Francisco stairs do not accommodate two beds passing each other, and there is usually only one workable loading spot outside the building — which the delivery truck will be using. Tell us the cross street and your street-cleaning window when you book and we will slot around it.

Frequently asked questions