Garage Cleanout in Chicopee, MA

A garage is the hardest room in a house to clear, not because of the volume but because of the variety. One space holds furniture, scrap metal, tires, electronics, yard tools, paint, motor oil and half a bag of concrete, and every one of those goes somewhere different.

The volume itself is usually a half to a full truck for a standard two car garage that has been filling up for a decade. That is $300 to $900 in this area. A single bay or a partial clear is less. What moves the number is not really the amount, it is how much sorting the load needs.

Access is usually the easy part, which is the one mercy of this job. A garage door is wide, the floor is flat, and the truck can normally back right up to it. Compared with carrying the same volume down from an attic, a garage is straightforward work.

The part that has to be dealt with separately

Paint, motor oil, antifreeze, brake fluid, solvents, pesticides, pool chemicals and propane tanks are household hazardous waste. No hauler takes them and no transfer station accepts them in a regular load. They go to your town's hazardous waste day, which most towns in this region run once or twice a year. Pull those out into a corner before the truck arrives so they do not hold the job up.

What is actually worth money in there

More than you would think. Massachusetts has banned metals from disposal since 1 July 2006, so the steel shelving, the dead lawn mower, the old bicycle, the bed frame and the coils of wire all go to a scrap yard. That lowers the price of the load rather than raising it. Copper and brass fittings are worth noticeably more, so say if there is any.

Tires are the opposite. Whole tires have been banned from landfill since 1991 and have to be shredded, so each one carries a fee of about $5 to $20. Almost every garage in this region has a set nobody knew what to do with. Count them and mention the number.

Appliances in a garage are common too, usually a second fridge or a chest freezer. Anything with refrigerant needs recovery by a certified technician under federal law before it can be scrapped, so it carries its own fee of $25 to $50 on top.

Before the truck comes

Two things make this job go faster and cheaper. Pull the hazardous items into one corner and label it so nothing gets loaded by mistake. And do a genuine pass for anything you actually want, because once a crew starts moving at speed, a box of photographs looks exactly like a box of junk. Everything else can be decided as it goes.