The apartment-dense, student-heavy blocks by Duke — and a May move-out crunch every year. Mattresses from $111, a whole shared apartment from $295, carried down from a walk-up and hauled the same day. Flat photo-quoted, no stair fee, no mattress surcharge, no NC sales tax on the service.
Snap a photo — flat price back in seconds
Upload a Photo & Get Quote →Ninth Street is Durham's student main street — a few blocks of shops and restaurants at the edge of Duke's East Campus, ringed by 27705's apartment blocks, converted houses and rental duplexes running out toward Broad, Markham and Erwin. It is the densest concentration of young renters in the city, and its calendar is not the city's calendar. It's Duke's.
Which means early-to-mid May is a wall. Roughly 17,000 Duke students finish inside the same handful of days; dorms close, leases end, and every apartment block within walking distance of East Campus empties at once. Building dumpsters are full by mid-morning on the first day. Mattresses appear in stairwells and breezeways. The queen that never fit in a Corolla ends up standing on end beside a compactor with somebody's name on the lease attached to it. Then it goes quiet until August, when the same thing happens in miniature on the way back in and nobody wants the previous tenant's futon.
We run same-day mattress and furniture hauls straight through that week — carried down from the apartment, not collected from a curb — flat-priced from a photo, with usable goods routed to donation.
One picture of everything that's leaving — mattress, futon, desk, the mini fridge nobody claims. Exact flat price back in seconds.
Same- or next-day most of the year. In the first two weeks of May, book a day or two out — that week fills from the morning.
Insured crew takes it from the unit, down the stairs, out through the breezeway. Usable stuff donated. Nothing left beside the dumpster with your name on it.
Flat, photo-quoted, by the piece — the carry-down, the drive and the disposal are already inside the number. This is the list a Ninth Street apartment actually generates:
| Item | Flat price |
|---|---|
| Microwave | $40 |
| Moving box | $42 |
| Bag of clothes / trash bag | $47 |
| Office / desk chair | $82 |
| TV (medium) | $91 |
| Bookshelf | $97 |
| Twin mattress | $111 |
| Desk | $112 |
| Box spring | $124 |
| Full mattress | $126 |
| Loveseat | $128 |
| Queen mattress | $139 |
| Futon | $139 |
| King mattress | $154 |
| Mini fridge | $155 |
| Sofa / couch | $170 |
| 10 bags or boxes | $178 |
| Whole apartment — truck-fill 1/4 | $295 |
| Truck-fill 1/2 | $525 |
| Truck-fill full | $895 |
$75 order minimum, which is worth knowing before you book: a $40 microwave on its own bills at $75, not $40. The move that actually saves money in a shared apartment is to photograph everything at once and take the single number — a four-person unit is usually a quarter truck at $295, which splits four ways at about $74 each, versus four separate visits each hitting the $75 floor. No mattress surcharge, no stair fee, no trip charge, disposal included, and no NC sales tax on the service.
Third-party context for what this should cost in the Triangle: Junk Doctors publishes a $135 minimum, a quarter truck at $298 and a full truck at $738 (junkdrs.com/pricing); McJunk publishes a $175 minimum up to $695 for a full truck, plus a $40 mattress surcharge, $10 per tire, $10 per CRT television and a $10 to $50 trip charge. In a neighborhood where the job is nearly always a mattress, that surcharge line is the one to compare — ours doesn't exist. On a whole truck, though, their published rates beat our $895, and we'd rather say so.
| Option | Cost | Speed | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leave it by the building dumpster | "Free" until it isn't | Immediate | Not covered by the building's private contract — management bills the lease-holder, usually out of the deposit |
| Durham curbside bulky collection | Per the City's current schedule | Scheduled collection day | Apartments on private dumpster service generally aren't on municipal collection at all |
| Campus donation drive | Free | Only while the bins are open | Clean, usable items only — mattresses and broken furniture aren't accepted |
| Self-haul to Durham Waste Disposal & Recycling Center | ~$65/ton MSW; metal & appliances free | One trip, if you have a truck | You need a vehicle, a helper and the muscle to get it down three flights first |
| Traditional truck-fill hauler | $135–$175 minimums published, +$40/mattress at McJunk | 1–3 days | Volume-priced with surcharges, often confirmed only on site |
| JunkRabbit | $111–$154 a mattress · $295 an apartment | Same-day, even in May | None — flat photo price, we carry it down, no mattress surcharge |
Start with the correction that saves a wasted morning, because search results here are dominated by the wrong city: the City of Raleigh's roughly $35 Bulky Load is not available to you. Neither is Raleigh's ~$70 special appliance pickup or its free weekly electronics collection. Those belong to City of Raleigh Solid Waste Services (919-996-3245) and serve City of Raleigh collection customers in Wake County. Ninth Street is in Durham — different city, different county, different department. Durham runs its own scheduled curbside bulky collection through Solid Waste Management; check durhamnc.gov for the current rules and calendar, because they change.
The local disposal end of the system is the Durham Waste Disposal & Recycling Center, and it's a good public facility: municipal solid waste transfers at roughly $65 a ton, appliance and scrap-metal recycling is free, and up to five certified tires come in free. If you have a truck, use it. Most people reading this page do not have a truck — that's the whole reason they're reading it.
And here's the gap that no municipal program closes in 27705: curbside collection is designed for houses, and this is not a neighborhood of houses. Apartment blocks are on private commercial dumpster or compactor service, which usually means they aren't on City bulky collection at all — and the dumpster itself is contracted for household trash, not a queen mattress. Management is entitled to bill the tenant who leaves one beside it, and that charge lands on the security deposit at exactly the moment nobody is around to argue about it. Then there's the third-floor problem: even where a curbside program exists, it collects what's already at the street. The hard part of a Ninth Street move-out has never been hauling. It's getting a mattress down a stairwell in the same week 17,000 other people are trying to do the same thing.
What we can't take: paint, solvents, propane canisters and other household hazardous waste — Durham County has a route for those, and we'll flag it from your photo.
We'll say the unprofitable thing plainly: if a campus move-out donation drive is still collecting and your item is clean and usable, donate it there. Duke and the other Triangle campuses run end-of-semester collections precisely so working mini fridges, lamps, storage bins and unopened food don't end up in a landfill in the second week of May. Those programs work, they're free, and we'd rather coordinate with them than compete against them.
Call us for what they can't take — and it's a lot. Mattresses are almost never accepted by a donation drive. Neither is broken particle-board furniture, a futon frame with a bent hinge, or the eleventh-hour pile that appears after the bins close. Everything usable that reaches our truck goes to donation anyway: Habitat for Humanity ReStore has a Durham location among its ten Triangle stores and takes solid furniture, and Goodwill of Eastern North Carolina takes household goods. Televisions, monitors, computers and appliances are landfill-banned statewide in North Carolina, so those go to e-waste and scrap recycling — and the Durham Waste Disposal & Recycling Center takes appliances and metal free, which is exactly why hauling a mini fridge properly costs you nothing extra with us. Only the genuine remainder is disposed of.
The access story around Ninth Street is simple and it's the whole job: most of this apartment stock is walk-up with no elevator. Two- and three-story buildings, exterior stairs, breezeway landings, a turn at the bottom, and a parking lot that in the second week of May is full of double-parked SUVs with parents in them. A queen mattress does not go down those stairs alone, and the reason people abandon them in stairwells is not laziness — it's that one person physically cannot.
So we plan around it. The stairs are in the flat price: no stair fee, no long-carry fee, no re-quote when the crew sees the staircase. Where a building does have an elevator or a loading area, we book the window with the leasing office; some Durham managers want a certificate of insurance on file, which is a far lighter lift here than in a high-rise city and which we send ahead if you flag it. On the street itself, Ninth Street's own frontage is metered retail parking, so for units right on the strip we stage the truck on a side street and carry rather than blocking the block.
One piece of timing advice worth more than anything else on this page: book before your walkthrough, not after. The deposit dispute you're trying to avoid is decided by what's in the unit when the property manager opens the door.
"Ninth Street apartment turnover — two mattresses and a couch out, quoted from a photo, gone next morning. No sales tax, no hassle."
"Helped my Duke student clear out before finals. Same-day, flat price, so much easier than a truck rental."
How much to haul a mattress and furniture?
Twin $111, full $126, queen $139, king $154, box spring $124, futon $139, loveseat $128, sofa $170, desk $112, bookshelf $97, mini fridge $155, microwave $40, ten bags $178. Whole apartment: quarter truck $295, half $525. $75 minimum, disposal included, no mattress surcharge, no NC sales tax.
Can you do same-day Duke move-out?
Yes — it's our busiest week. Same- or next-day most of the year; in early-to-mid May book a day or two ahead because the calendar fills from the morning.
Does Raleigh's $35 Bulky Load apply here?
No. That's City of Raleigh Solid Waste Services for Wake County collection customers. Durham runs its own program (durhamnc.gov), and apartment buildings on private dumpster service usually aren't on municipal collection at all.
Can I leave the mattress by the dumpster?
Don't. It isn't covered by the building's private contract, and management bills the lease-holder — typically out of the deposit, for more than the haul would have cost.
Should I use the campus donation drive instead?
If it's clean, usable, and the bins are open — yes, donate it. Call us for the mattress, the broken furniture, and whatever's left after the bins close.
No elevator — is that extra?
No. Walk-up carry-down is included. No stair fee, no long-carry fee, no on-site re-quote.
Can roommates split it?
Yes — photograph the whole unit, take one number, split it. A quarter truck at $295 across four people beats four separate $75-minimum pickups.
Are you cheaper than Junk Doctors or McJunk?
On a small move-out load, yes: $75 minimum against their published $135 and $175, and no $40-per-mattress surcharge. On a full truck, their published rates beat our $895.