The attic is the only room in the house most people have never fully emptied. Boxes go up, nothing comes down, and eventually somebody inherits the problem. In a hundred-year-old house in Lexington or Andover, that can be decades of it stacked under the rafters.
Attics are also the hardest space we clear, and it has very little to do with how much is up there. It is the ladder, the floor, and the heat. A basement cleanout is easy by comparison. You can stand up in a basement, and the stairs were built for people carrying things.
What an attic cleanout costs
We price by volume, meaning how much space the contents take in the trailer. $90 covers one or two items. $250 is a truck load. $425 is a half trailer. $650 is a full trailer. Labor, loading, hauling, and disposal are all inside that number.
Then access gets added on top, and this is where attics separate themselves from every other room. Most attic jobs carry an access add-on, and a fair number carry the highest one. More on why in the next two sections.
Weight is usually kind to you here. Attic contents are mostly boxes, decorations, and light furniture, which often prices as light at 0.9x rather than standard. Over 8 items adds $4 per item beyond the first 8. Quotes carry roughly plus or minus 15 percent until we are standing in the attic looking at it.
Attics are exactly the job hourly haulers like. Slow access, small items, a lot of trips. We charge $425 for a half trailer whether the crew is done in ninety minutes or still working four hours later. A slow afternoon costs us, not you.
| What is up there | Typical volume | Flat base price |
|---|---|---|
| A few boxes and an old chair | 1–2 items | $90 |
| Boxes, holiday bins, an old mattress | Truck load | $250 |
| Full attic, furniture and decades of boxes | Half trailer | $425 |
| Walk-up attic used as storage for the whole house | Full trailer | $650 |
A pull-down ladder is not rated for a person carrying a box
Pull-down attic ladders carry a weight rating from the manufacturer, and that rating assumes one person and nothing in their hands. The label is usually still stapled to the side of it. Nobody reads the label. Then somebody comes down it backwards holding a box of books.
That is the most common way an attic cleanout goes wrong, and it has nothing to do with the junk. The crew works it differently. Items get passed down rather than carried down, one person stays at the top and one at the bottom, and nothing heavy comes down in somebody's arms.
The access rating follows the stairs. A floored attic at the top of a real staircase is straightforward. A pull-down ladder into a dark unfloored space is the +$120 band, and it is the band most older houses in our towns fall into.
| Attic access | Add-on |
|---|---|
| Ground-level or over-garage attic, easy in and out | +$0 |
| One flight up, floored, full staircase | +$40 |
| Two or more flights, floored walk-up attic | +$80 |
| Pull-down ladder, no floor, low headroom | +$120 |
Half of these attics do not have a floor
In a lot of older Massachusetts houses the attic is joists, insulation, and nothing else. There are no boards across the top. Step between the joists and your foot goes through the ceiling of the bedroom below.
That is a plaster repair and a paint job on top of the cleanout you were already paying for. It is also why attic work is slow. We lay boards across the joists and work off those, moving the boards as we go.
When you send photos, include one of the floor, or of where the floor is not. That single photo changes the access rating more than the amount of stuff does.
We book August attics for seven in the morning
An unvented attic in August is brutal. The air up there sits well above the outside temperature all afternoon and none of it moves.
So we schedule attics early. We start at 07:00 Monday through Saturday, and in July and August the attic jobs go at the front of the day rather than after lunch. A crew working slowly in a hot attic is a crew making mistakes a few feet from a hole in the floor.
If you are doing this yourself, do the same thing. Early morning, water within reach, and come down before you stop paying attention.
If the insulation is vermiculite, we stop
Vermiculite insulation may contain asbestos. It looks like loose grey-brown pebbles, a bit like gravel or unpopped popcorn, poured between the joists rather than laid in batts. A large share of what went into American attics came from a single mine with a known asbestos problem.
If your attic has it, we do not touch it and we do not work around it. That one does not bend. Asbestos sits on the short list of things we cannot take, along with wet paint, chemicals, medical waste, and propane tanks.
What you do instead is call a licensed asbestos abatement contractor and have it tested before anything gets disturbed. Disturbing it is the whole problem. Undisturbed material sitting in a sealed attic is a different situation from material somebody has been walking through for a week. The EPA guidance on vermiculite insulation is the plain-English version of this.
Once abatement is finished and the space is cleared for work, call us back. We will haul the boxes.
Knob-and-tube wiring runs through a lot of these attics
Older houses in Lexington, Andover, Billerica, and Concord often still have knob-and-tube wiring in the attic. Ceramic knobs screwed to the joists, cloth-covered wire strung between them, running off into the dark.
Some of it is live. We work around it. We do not move it, cut it, lean anything on it, or bury it under something on the way out. If a box is sitting on top of a run, that comes off carefully rather than quickly.
If you do not know whether yours is live, an electrician can tell you in about an hour. Worth knowing before anyone spends a day up there, and worth knowing before you insulate.
What actually comes out of an attic
Attic contents are more consistent than people expect. It is rarely the interesting stuff and it is almost never the heavy stuff.
- Boxes of paper — tax records, letters, photographs
- Holiday decorations, several bins of them
- Furniture that went up before somebody floored over the stairwell
- Old mattresses, bed frames, and a crib
- Suitcases, luggage sets, and the trunk everybody assumes has something in it
Go up and set things aside before the crew does
The attic is the space most likely to hold something you actually want. Photographs, documents, and occasionally a piece of furniture worth more than the whole haul-off. Pull those out before the day, because once the crew starts moving, we are moving.
A customer in Chelmsford was clearing her late father's house and the attic was the part she had been dreading. We went through it slowly with her and set aside what she wanted to keep before anything went on the trailer. The job took longer than the quote assumed and the price did not change.
Everything else follows the usual route, same as a garage cleanout. Usable items get donated locally to Goodwill, Savers, or Habitat ReStore. Metal and electronics go to licensed recyclers. Only true waste heads to the transfer station.
When you should not call us
If the attic has vermiculite, we are the wrong call. Abatement contractor first, us second, and there is no version where we go first.
Ten boxes and a truck of your own beats our $90. Dump fees in most of our towns run $20 to $50 a visit depending on weight. We will tell you that on the phone rather than take the booking.
Paper is the other one. Your town collects it at the curb for free, so do not pay us to haul what the recycling truck already takes.
And if the ladder feels wrong under your foot, come back down and leave it for us. That is the part of an attic that actually hurts people.
Get a flat price for your attic
Text photos of the attic and your town to (978) 330-8980, or email them to quotes@statementjunkremoval.com. Get the ladder, the floor, and the far corner into the shots. One flat price back within 24 hours, carrying about plus or minus 15 percent until we are standing in it. We cover 16 towns with Billerica as home base.
If it turns out to be vermiculite, we will tell you to call somebody else.