Rantz: Dumping furniture in Seattle the pinnacle of laziness

Need to re-furnish your home? Seattle has you covered. Just go for a drive.

“I didn’t quite understand how lazy we’ve become,” KIRO Radio’s Jason Rantz said. “We are actually now dumping furniture on the side of the street, rather than call someone to recycle it for us.”

KING 5 reports that Fremont is being filled with furniture. So much that some neighbors are naming the items: Couchy and Lovey the love seat for example.

“It’s bad throughout the whole north end of Seattle,” Fremont resident Joan James told KING 5. “You can furnish a house by driving around Seattle.”

“I suppose you could,” Rantz responded. “But to be fair, you have to have zero taste whatsoever.”

Rantz also noted that you will have to be OK with furniture that’s been out in the rain for a little while.

The rise in roadside furniture is something that the city has picked up on, but hasn’t picked up. Ever since the city launched its “Find it, Fix It” app, allowing residents to notify the city of specific issues around town, the city’s utility department has been overwhelmed with notices about abandoned furniture,
according to KING 5. While it usually takes an average of 10 days for the city to respond to such complaints and haul away the furniture, it’s now taking about 20 days to get the job done.

“I don’t blame the City of Seattle for the backlog here because this is not its main job. I will happily jump on SDOT or another department for not doing its job. But this is not really its job,” Rantz said.

“It’s so lazy. It’s not like you’re dumping it outside your own home because you don’t want to look at it,” Rantz added. “You’re, presumably, loading it onto a truck and carrying it somewhere else.”

“By the way, it’s Fremont where there’s a recycling center that you could have easily taken it to,” he said. “But instead you do it this way. Someone is doing it in the middle of the night. No one is doing it during the day because they don’t want to get caught being that guy.”

So you set your alarm for 2 a.m. You tip-toe to your closet, pull out a black sweater, black sweatpants, and a black hoodie.

Break out some of that dark face paint you’ve had since Halloween 2002.

You meet your buddy outside, sitting in his idling truck. He looks at you with pure disgust, but a bit of relief knowing how much you owe him now.

You sneak back into the house, carry out the bulky, old, gross couch and you load it onto the truck.

It gets a little loud and you look around to make sure no one saw you, but you’re all clear.

Then you drive five blocks down, you see that ugly house where the homeowner hasn’t mowed his lawn in seven months, and you just dump it and run.

Had you driven another five blocks, you probably could have taken it to a recycling center.

“You can literally call the Salvation Army, they will send a truck, they will come into your home, they will remove the piece of furniture, put it into their truck and leave,” he said. “It’s fantastic. I’ve done it a couple times. It makes life so much easier.”

The Salvation Army is actually just one of many options Seattleites have to rid themselves of unwanted items.

There’s Angels Junk Removal, Share House, and let’s not forget Craigslist.