Can you donate furniture to Goodwill? Not at every store

There is no head office that can say yes for your sofa. The national site only points you to whichever regional Goodwill covers your zip, and that regional group runs its own stores on its own rules. Find your nearest store, call that store, and ask for whoever works the donation door.

Four questions, in this order.

• •"Do you take upholstered furniture this week?" Stores turn that on and off with floor space. The answer in April is not the answer in August.
• •Describe the damage out loud. The stain, the cat, the leg that wobbles. They will see it at the door either way, and you would rather hear no on the phone.
• •"What hours is the donation door open today?" It usually closes well before the store does, and often earlier on Sunday.
• •"Will anyone help me unload?" The answer decides what vehicle and how many people you need.

One thing they cannot give you is a date. No store will hold a spot for your sofa, there is no appointment to book, and whatever they have room for on the morning you pull up is what they take.

If the piece is clean and it fits in your car, that is fine. Goodwill drop-off is free, it is close to you, and it is a forty minute errand. Go do it and skip the rest of this page.

If it will not fit in anything you own, call a local Habitat ReStore instead and ask for the next pickup date they have. ReStores generally take large furniture and run their own trucks, though every affiliate sets its own accept list and not all of them run a truck. The date belongs to their route, not to you, and in a busy month it can sit two or three weeks out. If your room can wait that long, take it.

Goodwill sells what you give them. If a shopper would carry it out that week, they want it: clean upholstery with no odor, solid wood dressers and tables, complete dining sets, bookcases, desks, office chairs, small side tables.

Here is what commonly gets a no, even from a store that takes furniture.

• •Upholstery with a stain, a smell, or pet hair. The most common refusal by far, and it is judged by eye in about four seconds.
• •Mattresses and box springs. Refused essentially everywhere. A used mattress cannot go on a retail floor.
• •Sleeper sofas. There is a steel frame folded inside, which puts a three seat model near 200 pounds and takes two staff to walk in.
• •Particle board that has swollen at a corner or a leg. Once the edge puffs it will not sell, and it will not survive another move anyway.
• •Anything incomplete. Missing hardware, one chair short of the set, a bed frame with no rails.
• •A genuinely nice sofa, on a week the store already has six of them. Floor space runs out. You cannot see theirs from your driveway.

The person who decides is standing at the donation door, and they decide when they see it, not when you call. You cannot look up their floor, you cannot reserve a slot, and a yes on Tuesday is not a yes on Saturday. So the honest sequence is: call, describe the damage, get a yes, borrow a truck, and go while the yes still holds. If any one of those steps slips, the sofa is back in the living room by 4 PM and the whole thing starts over next weekend.

This is a removal, not a donation, so none of it is free. If a store will take the piece, the call above is the better answer and it costs you nothing. If it comes home again, here is what curbside pickup costs.

You were about to give a sofa to a name every person in America knows. Handing it instead to a company you found in a search result is a real gap, so here is a customer saying it out loud. Melissa booked from St. Louis and left this on our Google profile.

"I was concerned this wasn't a legit company, but they absolutely are and I'm so glad I found them as I was quoted $1500 by another company in the St. Louis area. I was provided with photos from the pickup to validate that the items had been removed."

Melissa Mader, Google

Go on a weekday morning if you can. The donation door is quietest early in the week and the attendant has more time for a borderline piece.

Bring a strap and a blanket. A sofa scraped in the back of a truck can be turned away for damage it did not have when you called.

Photograph it at home before it goes in the truck. That is your record if you ever deduct it.

Ask for the receipt before you drive off. It will not carry a dollar value on it. Putting a number on the item is the donor's job, not the store's.

And the deduction only helps if you itemize. Most people take the standard deduction and get nothing back for the sofa, which is fine. The point was that somebody else gets to use it.