Garage Cleanout in Chicopee, MA

A garage is the hardest room to clear, and the reason is variety rather than volume. One space holds furniture, scrap steel, tires, electronics, yard tools, paint, engine oil and half a bag of cement, and every one of those has a different destination.

Volume is usually a half to a full truck for a two car garage that has been filling for a decade, so $300 to $900 around here. One bay, or clearing only part of it, comes in under that. What moves the figure is not really the amount, it is how much separating the load needs.

Access is the one mercy. The door is wide, the slab is flat, and a truck can usually back straight up to it. Set against carrying the same volume down from an attic, a garage is easy work.

The corner that has to be dealt with separately

Paint, engine oil, antifreeze, brake fluid, thinners, weedkiller, pool chemicals and propane bottles are household hazardous waste. No hauler takes them and no transfer station accepts them inside a normal load. They belong at the city collection, which most towns around here run once or twice a year. Pull them into one corner before the truck arrives so nothing holds up the job.

What is actually worth something in there

More than you would guess. Metal has been off the Massachusetts disposal list since 1 July 2006, so the steel shelving, the dead mower, the old bicycle, the bed frame and the loose wire all head to a scrap yard. That pulls the price down rather than pushing it up. Copper and brass fittings are worth noticeably more, so say if any are in there.

Tires go the opposite way. Whole ones were shut out of landfills in 1991 and have to be shredded, so each carries roughly $5 to $20. Nearly every garage in this city has a set somebody never worked out what to do with. Count them and give the number.

Appliances turn up here constantly, usually a second fridge or a chest freezer. Anything holding refrigerant needs a certified technician to recover it under federal law before the shell can be scrapped, which adds $25 to $50 of its own.

Two things before the truck comes

Move the hazardous items into one corner and label it, so nothing gets loaded by mistake. Then do a genuine pass for anything you actually want, because once a crew is moving quickly a box of photographs looks exactly like a box of nothing. The rest of the calls can be made while they work.