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Chicago’s tall condo buildings and crowded high-rise neighborhoods make cleanouts much harder than just clearing out a garage in the suburbs. The city’s Municipal Code has laws for condos that change how you need to manage junk removal, and the Illinois Condominium Property Act now lets condo boards ask unit owners to show proof of insurance since January 2025.
You need to reserve the elevator and get insurance paperwork before you even start moving anything out. If you make a mistake during a rushed move-out, you could end up with fines or damage claims that cost thousands of dollars more than the cleanout would have cost in the first place. Chicago has very strict laws for throwing away electronics and hazardous materials. Building managers keep a close watch on what goes on in their buildings, and most condo associations will hit you with fines if you break the laws.
I’ll show you some of the main building laws and explain how to set up elevator times without making your neighbors angry or breaking any of your building’s policies.
When you clean out your condo, you’ll need to follow two different sets of laws that don’t always match up. Your condo board has its own requirements about how you protect the hallways and what hours you can make noise. At the same time, the City of Chicago has Chapter 13-72 that covers fire inspector access and maintenance standards. These two sets of laws don’t usually work together the way you’d expect.
Most residents have problems with all of the paperwork that comes with this process. Your management company will probably want 48 hours’ warning because they need to set up elevator access around other residents’ schedules. Say you have neighbors who might get stuck in the lobby with all your old furniture and boxes while they wait for the elevator you’ve been taking up all morning.
The city cares about how you get rid of electronics and appliances. You can’t just throw refrigerators or fluorescent bulbs in a normal dumpster. If you have anything with refrigerants in it, you’ll need to get a certified technician to drain them first. Batteries and other hazardous materials need special handling, too.
If you ignore disposal laws, you’ll have problems with your cleanout schedule. When you break Environmental Protection Agency laws, they might start investigations that stop your whole project. Then, your closing timeline depends on whether you’re following all of the laws – even though these seemed like small details when you started. If you ignore these laws, you might get fines or delays that push back your closing date. One condo owner had to pay thousands of dollars in fines after they didn’t follow municipal disposal requirements during their cleanout.
The hard part is that what your condo board calls a “common area” isn’t always the same as what the city regulates. Your hallway might fall under condo laws. But the loading dock could be governed by city ordinances instead. The people making these different laws care about completely different issues.
Once you get the basic laws, you’ll run into your next big challenge with elevators. Most Chicago high-rises have passenger elevators that people use every day and service elevators for moves and maintenance. The difference between these two can become pretty obvious once you start working in these buildings.
Buildings like Marina City show you how these dual-elevator systems can throw off your whole schedule. When you reserve the service elevator, you usually get a set time window that you can’t go over. Some buildings will only have one service elevator for forty floors of residents, which means if you’re late, you mess up the schedule for everyone else who needs it.
To reserve an elevator, you’ll need to go through your building management office. Book your slot ahead and make sure they put protective padding on the elevator walls. Most buildings need you to give them 48 hours’ notice, though some want a full week during busy seasons. When they say a week, they mean it.
Your crew needs to arrive on time because going over your scheduled time creates problems for everyone. If you miss your elevator window, it creates expensive problems that affect the entire building schedule. The next person who reserved it could be moving in with a full truck, or maintenance might need to get in for emergency repairs. Buildings will usually charge big fees when cleanout teams go over their time. Your delay turns into everyone else’s headache.
You’ll also need to watch lobby traffic. Moving dollies and large furniture pieces block everything up during rush hours when people head to work. Morning rush hour is the worst time to try this. Pets get nervous around the commotion, and neighbors might complain if your items block their path to the mailboxes.
I recently saw an insurance claim that came from elevator wall damage when a cleanout crew didn’t put up their padding right. The sharp edge of a metal desk frame cut into the interior panel, and the building wanted it replaced right away.
Once the elevator schedule is set, you’ll need to manage the insurance paperwork. Most Chicago condo associations want contractors to carry somewhere between one and two million dollars in liability coverage – it’s pretty much what all buildings across the city are asking for. They’ll also want to see certificates of insurance that list the building as an extra insured party.
Here’s where people usually mess up. Your certificate has to show the exact building address and the exact unit number. I know of one cleanout company that had their entire job shut down because their insurance certificate showed the wrong street address. The building manager wouldn’t let them work until they got new paperwork with the right information on it.
When you have the wrong information on your paperwork, everything stops immediately. Building managers can’t bend their policies on insurance because they’re the ones who get in hot water if something goes wrong and the paperwork isn’t right.
You should double-check the coverage dates, too. If your insurance is expired, you won’t get elevator access, and you won’t be able to do your cleanout that day – and this happens more than you’d think. Some associations will also want to see proof of worker’s compensation along with the main certificate. If an underinsured contractor gets hurt on the property, the building’s master policy could end up paying for it.
Recent changes to Illinois law have helped speed this process up a bit. Condo boards have to get back to you about insurance document requests within ten business days. You’ll also need to show them your own unit policy information and get a copy of the association’s master coverage information. All of these documents need to have the latest dates and the right address information.
Buildings take these requirements really seriously because just one accident with bad coverage can cost them a fortune.
Your condo cleanout doesn’t have to add more waste to Chicago’s landfills, which are already pretty full. The city needs all multi-unit buildings to have the right recycling set up through Blue Cart-style bins or private haulers – that means you’ve already got what you need to manage your unwanted items.
First things first – separate your recyclables from everything else. Put your clean paper and cardboard in one pile, and then put your rinsed plastics and metals in another. Those pizza boxes with grease stains on them still have to go in the trash. When you combine recyclables with standard trash, the recycling company will charge you contamination fees that no one wants to work with. These charges can add up and ruin the whole point of recycling in the first place.
Chicago has some great donation networks that help you find new homes for your furniture and household items. The Chicago Furniture Bank takes your usable furniture and gets it to families who need it. You get to help someone out while you empty out your space at the same time.
That old couch of yours turns into someone’s first living room furniture. These families get the donated items just a few days after you drop them off. Every piece you donate means another family doesn’t have to buy something new or try to live without basic furniture.
Electronics have to be treated differently because they have materials inside that shouldn’t go in standard landfills. Your old laptop has metals in it that can be recovered and used again. The city has e-waste drop-off programs just for old computers and televisions. Lots of private haulers now have ways to compost organic waste, too.
If you sort materials right there during your cleanout, it gets much easier to send different types of waste where they need to go. Some dumpster rental businesses like this approach because it keeps their disposal costs down. What you end up with is less harm to the environment and usually lower fees for yourself.
It only takes a few extra minutes to sort items during your cleanout. You’ll skip those disposal fees and create more ways to donate items to people who need them.
Say you’re thinking about your options for a condo cleanout, and you have two main options. You can either do the whole job yourself, or you can hire a company to take care of it. Both strategies come with different costs and their own challenges that you’ll need to remember.
If you choose to do it yourself, it seems cheaper when you first think about it. You can rent a dolly for maybe forty dollars a day from your local hardware store, and you can reserve the elevator slot yourself. But then you’ll find out that you need to work around your schedule and your building’s laws – and most people haven’t figured out how tough this part can be. You might need three Saturdays to get everything done instead of just one because there’s only so much you can move by yourself in a single day.
That heavy lifting will take a toll on your back and knees, especially when you have to carry every single box down from the eighth floor – this physical work puts strain on your body when you’re already dealing with the emotional stress of clearing out a home. There’s also the chance of damaging the building when you work alone with big furniture pieces that you need to move through those tight hallways and doorways.
Professional moving companies come with their own insurance, and they know just how to protect the elevator walls and the building. They can usually finish in one day what might take you three or four weekends on your own. And you’ll pay more money upfront. But you don’t have to worry about the physical strain or any damage fees that might come up. These companies also know your building’s laws inside and out, and they can work with these requirements without any delays.
When you hire professional cleanout teams, they take care of everything from scheduling to disposal, which can hurt your plans if you try to do it alone. They’ll set up the elevator reservations, take care of all of the disposal requirements, and follow all of the building restrictions that might otherwise ruin your weekend plans. You’ll actually have a set date when everything will be finished instead of having the whole process drag on for weeks.
If you just have a small studio with a few pieces of furniture, then doing it yourself on a Saturday might work out fine. But if you’re looking at multiple rooms or you have heavy appliances to move, then hiring pros does look like the better choice.
When you need to clean out a condo, just get a few basic essentials right before you start. First, you’ll need to know what laws your building has, figure out when you can use the elevator, check that your insurance is up to date, and know where everything goes once you toss it. Most buildings have their own quirks for move-out procedures. The laws for insurance and having access to records have changed lately, so be sure what you need ahead of time.
I know that when you have to sort through everything and move out, it can get to you – especially when you’ve lived somewhere for years, and every item has memories behind it. The great news is that once you put together a good plan and know what your building needs from you, you can just do the work instead of worrying if you’re doing everything correctly. Say you walk into your condo next month and actually see all your floor space again without having to step around stuff.
When your space is empty, it does change your day-to-day life. You’ll feel less stressed when you can walk around your rooms without having to squeeze past boxes or piles of papers. You’ll get back the hours you used to spend looking for items you couldn’t find. Your friends and family will actually be able to come over and sit down somewhere.
Speaking of which, if the planning and heavy lifting seem like more than you want to take on by yourself, JUNK Relief is here to help. We’re a Chicago-based junk removal company with almost 20 years under our belt. We show up fast, we’re friendly, and we know what we’re doing – it doesn’t matter if you need us to haul away old furniture from your home or waste from a job site – we take care of it all, and we always tell you the price upfront. We also try to recycle and donate as much as we can because we want to keep our community clean. Book online or give us a call now, and our team will take care of the heavy lifting with same-day service you can count on.
If you’ve got junk in Chicago or the Chicagoland Suburbs, we can help. CALL US or TEXT US at (312) 800-1940.
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