Donating Furniture to ReStore and the Five Minute Rule

Recently, we donated some furniture to Habitats for Humanity ReStore in Iowa City. We got the idea from seeing our neighbors doing the same thing a few years ago.

ReStore requires you to put the items in your garage or driveway. The request for pickup is an easy on-line form. You have to upload photos of your items. I forgot to take a photo of the stone table top, so I had to use an old photo I took of it after a Cribbage game.

The story of the contrast between how long it took us to get the stuff out to the garage and how long it took the pick-up guy to get it into his truck is an example of what I’ll call the five-minute rule. If it takes the average person 5 hours to get heavy furniture from inside the house into the garage, it will take the pick-up guy 5 minutes to load it into his truck.

I took a photo of the table upside down because we had to take the legs off. Otherwise, we would never have gotten it through the doorway. It weighed a ton. We laid the table top upside down on a rug in the garage. I screwed the legs back on after we got it in the garage and left it upside down.

Getting a couple of sofas and a very heavy dining room table with a stone top out of the house was no easy task. It took us hours. I don’t know how the movers originally got them in the house. This was one of those “you really had to be there” episodes to appreciate.

We had to remove the feet from the sofas to get them through the doorway. They twist off, but they’re also attached with hex head screws. Oh, and those stick-on pads you apply to the bottoms of the feet so your floors don’t get scratched? You have to scrape those off to get to the screws. Just sayin’. Lucky, we had a hex head wrench that was long enough to reach through the hole in the foot. And even after we removed the feet, the sofas had to be turned just right to get it through the doorway. We’re talking less than a half-inch to spare on both sides.

It took most of the morning to get the items into the garage. I never want to do anything like that again.

Now here’s the kicker. The guy who came to pick up the furniture was a tall, wiry, friendly guy who had a hand truck and nobody else with him. The truck had a ramp. It took him about 5 minutes to hustle everything into the truck. Miraculous. I never thought of getting a hand truck. I probably could have rented one from U-Haul.

On the other hand, I doubt we’d have done much better if we’d had a hand truck. The pick-up guy was not just strong. He used Ninja physical maneuvers which made the whole job look easy. Five minutes.

By comparison, several hours after we finally got the stuff into the garage, it took me five minutes just to limp back into the house and collapse.

But Habitats for Humanity really appreciates your donations.