This is the biggest job we do. A single room is a truck load. A whole house is a stack of trailer loads, and pretending otherwise is how people get surprised on the day.
So this post does the thing most junk removal pages avoid. It tells you how many loads a house actually is, how we count them off your photos, and what a full house costs from the first bedroom to the last box in the attic. If you are clearing a parent's house, there is a step in here that matters more than the price.
A whole house is two to three trailers, not one price
Most full houses run $1,300 to $1,950. That is two or three full trailers at $650 each. A small house that has already been picked over comes in under that. A four-bedroom with a finished basement and a packed garage can go over it.
We price by volume, meaning how much space the stuff takes in the trailer. Labor, loading, hauling, and disposal are all inside that number. There is no per-room fee and no hourly meter.
Stairs and weight get added up front, not after the trailer is loaded. One flight adds $40. Two or more flights add $80. Access that is genuinely bad, like a bulkhead with a turn in it, adds $120. Heavy loads carry a multiplier: 1.2x for heavy, 1.45x for very heavy. A basement full of tile, books, and old exercise equipment is a heavy load.
| House | Typical volume | Flat price |
|---|---|---|
| Small house, already thinned out, furniture only | Half trailer | $425 |
| Two-bedroom ranch, normal amount of stuff | Full trailer | $650 |
| Three-bedroom with a full basement | Two full trailers | $1,300 |
| Four-bedroom with garage, attic, and 40 years of storage | Three full trailers | $1,950 |
How a photo walkthrough turns into a load count
Walk the house with your phone. Shoot every room, both directions. Open the basement door and shoot down the stairs. Open the garage. Get the attic hatch if you can reach it. Send it with your town.
We count each room into a rough volume, add them up into trailer loads, and send back one flat price within 24 hours. If it lands between two loads, we tell you which side of the line it is on and why.
That number carries about plus or minus 15 percent until we see it in person. We say that out loud, because the alternative is lowballing the photos and finding another $400 on the day.
Hourly haulers are paid to be slow, and a whole house is exactly where that gets expensive. A house is a long day by definition. We charge $650 for a full trailer whether the crew fills it in two hours or five. The slow afternoon costs us, not you.
Two things photos hide: weight and access. A garage that looks half empty can be full of tile, brick, and a snowblower. Narrow basement stairs change the number by $40 or $80. Mention both when you send the photos and the quote gets tighter.
Pull the keepsakes out before the crew arrives
Do this first. It is the one step in a cleanout you cannot undo.
In an estate house the things worth keeping are almost never the furniture. They are in drawers, coat pockets, shoeboxes, and the back of a closet. Once a trailer is loaded, nobody is finding a photo album in it.
So pick a bedroom. Everything you are keeping goes in there, and you tell us that room is off limits. The crew does not open it. Simple, and it removes the only real risk in a house cleanout.
A customer in Chelmsford was clearing out her late father's house. It was work she had been dreading for months. We ran it exactly this way: one room stayed closed, everything else went. The hauling was the easy half of that job.
If more than one family member is involved, do the set-aside before anyone books a date. Sorting is slow and emotional. Hauling is fast. Do not let the fast part wait on the slow part. Our estate cleanout checklist goes deeper on the paperwork, and estate cleanout costs covers what those jobs run.
Here is what belongs in that room:
- Photographs, albums, and loose prints in drawers
- Deeds, titles, tax returns, insurance policies, military records
- Jewelry, watches, coins, and cash tucked into books or coat pockets
- Anything with a name on it — letters, diplomas, a family bible
- Tools or furniture a sibling has already asked for
- Keys, because they usually go to something that is still locked
We work a house in the same order every time
The order is not arbitrary. It keeps the path to the trailer clear and puts the hardest carry at the start of the day.
- Basement first, while the crew is fresh and the stairs are the worst part of the day
- Garage second, because it is heavy and already at ground level
- Attic third, before the afternoon gets hot
- Bedrooms and closets next, top floor working down
- Living room, dining room, kitchen last — they are the widest path to the door
What comes out of a house nobody has emptied in 40 years
New England houses hold more than people expect. A 1960s ranch in Billerica or Tewksbury that has not been emptied since the kids moved out is usually two or three full trailers, even when it looks tidy on the main floor.
The contents are more predictable than you would think:
- Bedroom sets, mattresses, box springs, and a living room set from the 1990s
- Two or three CRT televisions, at least one still inside a wood cabinet
- A chest freezer in the basement and a second fridge in the garage
- Boxes of books, records, china, and holiday decorations
- Scrap lumber, storm windows, and shelves of hardware in the garage
- Exercise equipment. There is always exercise equipment
Five things we will leave behind, and one that needs a recycler
We cannot take wet paint, asbestos, chemicals, medical waste, or propane tanks. Old houses tend to have all five sitting in the same corner of the basement. Set them aside and your town hazardous waste day handles them. We will tell you before the day, not while the crew is standing there.
Old televisions are a separate case. Massachusetts puts cathode ray tubes on its waste disposal ban list, so the tube TVs in the basement cannot go out at the curb and most transfer stations charge for them. We take them, and they go to a licensed recycler along with the metal. There is more detail in our guide to electronics recycling in Massachusetts.
Everything else in a house is fair game. Furniture, appliances, carpet, mattresses, lumber, yard equipment, and the contents of every closet.
A full house takes two days, and it happens before the listing photos
Most of our work is a crew on site for one to three hours. A house is not that. Each trailer load has to be filled, driven, tipped, and brought back. Two loads make a long day. Three usually means we come back the next morning.
Booking runs 24 to 48 hours out for a standard job. For a whole house, give us a few days if you have them, because we block the calendar differently for a two-day cleanout. We run Monday to Saturday, 07:00 to 19:00, and we are closed Sunday. When a house gets staged across two days, Friday and Saturday is the pairing most people pick.
Day one is the basement, the garage, and anything heavy. Day two is the living space and the sweep-up. The house should be broom-clean when we pull out, not just empty.
If the house is being sold, work backwards from the closing date. The order that holds up is cleanout, then repairs, then cleaning, then photos, then listing. Shooting listing photos before the cleanout is how a house ends up on the market with a full basement in the pictures. Our post on junk removal before selling a house covers what buyers actually notice.
Give the schedule slack. If the closing is three weeks out, book the cleanout for week one, which leaves room for the paint, the carpet, and the thing nobody planned for. Tell us the date when you send the photos and we will say honestly whether we can hit it. There is no deposit on standard residential work either. Payment comes at the end, after the house is empty and you have walked it.
When you should not call us
If the house is already mostly empty, skip us. One truckload, a free Saturday, and a resident sticker will beat our $250. We will say so on the phone. We would rather lose a small job than charge someone for an afternoon they could handle themselves.
If the contents might be worth money, call an estate sale company before you call anyone with a trailer. Mid-century furniture, hand tools, records, and anything with a maker mark are often worth more sold than hauled. Come back to us for whatever did not move. Our estate cleanout companies post explains who does what.
If it is a hoarding situation with a biohazard element, that is remediation, not junk removal. Different equipment, different specialists. We will point you toward the right kind of company instead of pretending it is our job.
And if you are comparing us against another hauler on price, get both numbers as flat quotes for the whole house. An hourly rate on a two-day job is not a number. It is a range with no ceiling.
Send the house, get a load count back
Walk the house with your phone. Every room, plus the basement, the garage, and the attic if you can reach it. Text it to (978) 330-8980 with your town, or email quotes@statementjunkremoval.com. We come back with a load count and one flat price within 24 hours. If two transfer-station runs would do it cheaper, we will tell you that instead.