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Home Cleanouts

Whole-unit, estate and move-out clearances. In this city the hard part is almost never the container — it is the stairs and the alley.

(619) 658-9555Serving the whole city

Sizing

The floor plan tells you almost nothing

People size a clearance by the rooms they can see. What fills the container is the basement, the attic, the back porch and the garage — and Chicago buildings have more of all four than their square footage suggests.

The job	Usual container	What actually fills it
Studio or one-bed apartment	10 yard	Furniture and carpet. Genuinely straightforward.
Two or three bed unit, furnished	15 yard	Closets, and whatever is on the back porch.
Bungalow, long-term owner	20 yard	The attic and the basement, in roughly equal measure.
Two-flat, both units plus common areas	20–30 yard	Two of everything, plus a shared basement nobody has emptied.
Estate clearance, pre-war building	20 yard plus a swap	Decades of storage, much of it damp and heavy.
Rental turnover	15 yard	Carpet, mattresses and abandoned furniture.
Hoarding situation	20 yard, multiple swaps	Ring and talk it through properly before booking anything.

Note that the sizes here run smaller than they would in the suburbs, and that is deliberate. In most of this city the container has to fit an alley or a driveway strip, so two 15s often beats one 30 — and a swap in a city alley is a quick job.

Before the container arrives

The hour that saves the job

Walk the place and pull out the things Illinois will not let into a landfill. In a Chicago clearance you will find most of these:

Televisions, monitors and computers. Banned since 2012, and the single most common banned item in a city clear-out. An old CRT in a basement is practically standard issue.
Tyres. There is usually a set somewhere, especially where there is a garage.
Car batteries. Garage or back porch.
Motor oil, antifreeze and old fuel cans. Bulk liquids cannot go in at all.
Fridges, freezers and window air conditioners. Their regulated components have to come out first. Chicago back porches hold a remarkable number of old window units.
Wet paint and solvents. Dried latex is fine; liquid is not.

What you do not need to sort out, if you have cleared property in Michigan or Iowa: bottles and cans. Illinois has no deposit scheme, so they can go in the container.

Alley access behind Chicago buildings during a clearance

The real work

Stairs, back porches and the walk to the alley

A Chicago clearance is a materials-handling job before it is a container job, and the building type decides how hard it will be.

Work out the route first Front stair, rear stair or both. In a two-flat or three-flat the rear wooden porch is usually the working route — it is wider, it is less precious, and it comes out at the alley where the container is.
Check what the porch will take Chicago back porches are timber structures with a load rating and an inspection history. Do not stage a tonne of material on one. Carry it down and stage at ground level.
Break things down inside A dresser with its drawers in takes four times the space of one taken apart, and it is far harder to get down a stair. An hour of dismantling can be the difference between one container and two.
Stage, then load in one pass Pull everything to a single pile at ground level, then fill the container in one organised go. Loading in dribs and drabs wastes about a third of the volume.
Heavy and flat on the bottom Doors, plywood, table tops, headboards. They make a floor you can stack on. Bags go into the voids afterwards, not into the corners first.

Two places that are always heavier

The basement and the attic

Basements. Chicago basements are old, many are below the water table at least occasionally, and a great number have taken water at some point in their lives. Everything stored down there — cardboard, carpet, upholstered furniture, particle-board shelving, paper — has absorbed and dried a dozen times. Damp storage weighs a multiple of the same material dry, which is why a basement that looks like a 15 yard job reaches the weight limit of one while it still looks half full.

Bungalow attics. The other Chicago special. A bungalow attic is a low, awkward, often unfinished space reached by a narrow stair or a hatch, and it has been accumulating since the building went up. Getting material out of one is slow, and the volume is routinely double what people guess from the hatch opening. More on bungalow work →

If the clearance includes either, say so on the phone and we will size for weight rather than for floor area.

Estate work

When the clearance runs on somebody else's calendar

A good share of our clearance work is estate work, and it runs to a probate timetable, a closing date, or a family flying in for one weekend.

Tell us if the date is fixed. It changes the scheduling, it changes whether we hold a swap container ready rather than waiting for the call, and it changes the sizing advice — with a hard deadline you want the swap planned rather than hoped for.

It also changes when the container should arrive. If the family still wants to go through things, it should come after that, not before. More than one job has been made harder by a container turning up on a Friday and creating pressure nobody needed.

Common questions

What people ask when they call

Can you load it for us?

We deliver and collect; the loading is yours or your contractor's. If you need hands on the job, say so and we will point you at people in the city who do that work.

Where will the container go for an apartment clearance?

Usually the alley behind the building, which is also where your rear stair comes out. If the block has no alley it is a street placement, and we handle the permit.

How long will I need it?

A week is standard and about right for a unit worked at weekends. Extensions are routine if you tell us before collection — and on a public way placement, before the permit period runs out.

There is an old TV and a window air conditioner.

Both need setting aside. Electronics are banned from Illinois landfill outright, and the air conditioner needs its regulated components removed first. Mention them when you book.

Do I need to separate bottles and cans?

No. Illinois has no deposit scheme, unlike Michigan and Iowa. They can go in the container.

What if it fills before we are finished?

Ring for a swap — it is normal on clearances and quick in a city alley. Do not solve it by loading above the rail, because then it cannot be moved at all.