How to get rid of a mattress in Portland

The short answer

Flat, published, carry included:

The set price is the one to notice: a queen mattress and its box spring bought separately is $103 + $92 = $195, but the set rate is $143. Same two pieces, same visit.

Visit minimum is $75, which a single twin at $82 already clears.

Do not put it on the parking strip

This is the single most common Portland mattress mistake and it is worth being blunt about.

A mattress left out on the parking strip is a mattress that will be rained on. It happens fast — one overnight and the ticking is soaked, two days and it is a saturated slab that weighs vastly more than the thing you dragged out there. Nobody from a Buy Nothing group is coming to collect it. Scavengers will not take it. It then sits, visibly, in front of your house on a block in Richmond or Foster-Powell until somebody complains or you deal with it yourself.

And you have made the job harder, not easier: a dry queen two people can walk down a front path, a soaked one is a genuinely awkward, dripping carry. Keep it inside. Book the pickup. Let it leave dry.

Where a used mattress can and cannot go

Portland is a donation-first city and people try, which is to their credit. For mattresses specifically the answer is usually no.

• Thrift and reuse shops along Hawthorne, Mississippi and Alberta generally will not take used mattresses at all. Health rules, not snobbery.
• Furniture-bank style nonprofits sometimes take a mattress in genuinely excellent condition, and only sometimes. Call before you load it into a car.
• Oregon runs a statewide mattress recycling program with drop-off locations. If you have a truck and a free morning, check the current site list and their accepted-condition rules — a dry, clean mattress is the one they want. A wet one often is not.
• Anything with bed bugs goes nowhere but disposal, wrapped. Say so when you book so the crew brings the right plastic.

The stairs problem in old Portland houses

Mattresses are floppy, and a floppy king does not negotiate a turn.

The classic scenario here: a Craftsman bungalow in Woodstock or Sellwood with a bedroom under the roofline, reached by a narrow stair with a landing halfway and a low header at the top. A king went up there in pieces or before the railing went in, and now nobody can picture how it comes down. Same story in the Buckman and Kerns fourplexes where the third-floor unit has the original back stair.

None of that changes the price. A king is $114 out of a top-floor bedroom with a turn in the stair, the same as a king in a ground-floor room in a Beaverton ranch. There is no stair charge. The crew comes as a pair specifically because Portland housing stock demands it.

Common mattress-day combinations

Nobody replaces a mattress in isolation. The additions, with the arithmetic shown:

• Queen mattress + box spring set $143 + bed frame, standard $68 = $211
• King mattress $114 + box spring $92 + king bed frame, solid/upholstered $152 = $358
• Queen set $143 + dresser, standard $126 + nightstand $57 = $326
• Twin mattress $82 + bunk bed $123 = $205
• Full mattress $94 + adjustable bed base, motorized $118 = $212

Clearing an entire bedroom — bed, dresser, nightstands, a chair, a rug and the boxes in the closet — is often better priced as a quarter truck load at $241. Take whichever number is lower; both are published.

Timing it around a delivery

Mattress retailers in the metro will sometimes take the old one away on delivery and sometimes will not, and the answer changes by store and by promotion. Confirm it in writing before delivery day rather than assuming.

If they will not, book the removal for the same window. The failure mode is the one every Portland apartment has seen: the new mattress arrives, the old one goes out to the landing or the covered porch just for tonight, and then it rains for nine days. Get it collected the same day it comes off the frame.

Booking and access

Tell us the floor, roughly how many stairs, and whether the truck can get within reasonable distance. On tight inner-eastside blocks — Ladd's, Clinton, the numbered avenues off Alberta — the crew will often park a house or two down and carry. That is normal here and it is not billed separately.

If the mattress is in a detached garage, a carport, or a basement with its own outside door, you do not necessarily need to be home.

Frequently asked questions