1. Walk through your rental unit

After your tenant has vacated the unit and turned the keys over to you do a walk through the unit. You’ll want to bring with you a notepad and a cameras to document any damage, repairs to be made, or junk to be removed.

2. Hire a Junk Removal Service

Chances are your tenant left a few things behind he or she didn’t want or need anymore. These items could be old furniture, appliances, or anything else that your tenant didn’t want. Hire a junk removal service to come in and haul away whatever you need haul away.

3. Hire a Contractor or Handyman

Next up is to hire either a contractor or a skilled handyman to make any repairs needed to the unit. In most cases you won’t need a contractor. You’ll need a skilled handyman and a few laborers to make needed repairs and repaint.

4. Hire a Maid Service

Final step is to hire a maid service to clean up the unit from top to bottom. You can also save a bit of money and do this yourself.

This is some fairly standard advice. Following this walkthrough will help you keep your unit ready to rent.

Before 1961 trash removal in the Los Angeles area consisted of three separate services: wet trash removal (food waste, etc), bottles and cans, and dry garbage and trash. Until 1957 dry trash was burned in backyard Los Angeles incinerators. This contributed greatly to Los Angeles’ notorious pollution problems. In 1957 backyard incinerators and trash burning was banned, but trash still had to be separated and picked up separately. 

In 1961 Sam Yorty ran for Mayor of Los Angeles. A key portion of his platform of reforms was stopping the three separate trash pick ups and combining them into one single trash pick up. Yorty went as far as dumping bags of trash on the steps of City Hall to illustrate how difficult it was for a “normal housewife” to separate trash.

The 1960 / 1961 Los Angeles’ Mayoral race was one of the ugliest and most brutal elections in history (probably rivaled by Yorty’s reelection race against Tom Bradley in 1969). And trash removal defined that race. 

It’s up for debate whether Sam Yorty’s race against separate trash removal was good or bad for the city. But it is largely irrelevant now since modern day Los Angeles has expanded trash removal to include recycling bins at every home and most apartments.

Most cities have certain days, typically twice a year, where they take toxic materials like paint and dispose of them. If you need to get rid of paint and hazardous materials right away, call a junk removal service. A junk removal service specialize in disposing of paint, motor oils, household chemicals, and electronics.

So how did the world deal with trash before trash pick up? Trash wasn’t a huge health concern until people began living in cities. Native Americans, for instance, only generate about 5.3 pounds of trash per day. This trash was often buried or burned or sometimes just left in place.

Since the population of the Earth was so spread out and agrarian until the Industrial Revolution there wasn’t much need for trash pick up. The small amounts of trash a farmer might produced could be easily buried or burnt on his own land.

Trash pick up and waste management would only become an issue when the majority of the world’s populate  began shifting towards the city and an industrialized towns where people migrated to find jobs. Cities began to organize trash pick up as a way of controlling disease and removing enormous amounts of trash that would pile up in cities.

The concept of garbage removal goes back into the B.C.E.’s The first known garbage removal was practiced by some Greek Communities. But organized garbage removal is largely a late 19th and early 20th century invention. Before the Industrial Revolution and before the urbanization of both America and Europe trash was either burned, or buried in a backyard. Occasionally trash was simple thrown into the street or discarded in an alley. 

In the mid-1800s trash and garbage in streets and alleyways became a genuine health problem. Disease spread quickly from unburied garbage. Also the streets and alleyways were simply dirty and unpleasant to look at and walk on. The first organized garbage removal began in New York City in the late 1800s. Garbage removal as a service started in the cities.

Organized garbage removal did not reach many parts of America until the Great Depression. Even then many parts of the rural United States simply burned or buried their trash. Garbage removal would not reach these parts of America until the 1950s and 1960s when rural American began to transform into suburban American.

So garbage removal is largely a 20th Century invention that made our lives healthier and cleaner.

March 15, 2013