Boston has a particular kind of estate: a house one family held for fifty years or more — a two-family in Roslindale, a single in West Roxbury, a three-decker in Dorchester where the top floor was rented and the other two were home. Clearing one is a different job from clearing an apartment, and it goes better when you know what's coming.
Full truck $985, each additional truck the same — staged visits at no extra cost
Upload Photos & Get Quote →Most cleanouts are one household's worth of things. A fifty-year house is several households layered on top of each other — the current one, the one from when the children lived there, and often a parent's or grandparent's before that, absorbed when they in turn were cleared.
Three consequences follow. The volume is larger than any walk-through suggests, because most of it is in the attic and the basement rather than the rooms you see. The sorting matters more, because genuinely important things are mixed in rather than filed. And the decisions are harder, because everything belonged to someone the family is grieving.
None of that is a reason to rush it, and the pricing below is designed so you don't have to.
Four passes, and the sequence is the single most important thing on this page.
1. Documents and valuables. Deeds, titles, policies, financial records, jewellery, photographs.
2. Family keepsakes. What relatives are keeping — marked, or moved to one room so nothing goes by accident.
3. Anything being sold. An estate sale, a dealer, a specific piece to a specific buyer.
4. The clear. Everything that remains.
Why the order is not negotiable: it isn't reversible. Once a load has left, what was in it has gone. The common and painful mistake is starting with the visible clutter — the obviously worthless things — and reaching the papers after two loads have already left the house.
The rooms are the small part. Here's where the volume is.
The attic. In these houses it's usually floored and full: decorations, luggage, the children's things kept for grandchildren who never wanted them, curtains from three renovations ago. Attic loads are slow to handle — ladders, joists, low headroom — and they're rarely visible in a photo taken from the hatch.
The basement. Tools, paint, the workbench, the second refrigerator at $221, a washer at $179, and decades of cardboard that a New England winter has been working on. What that winter does to stored things.
The formal dining room. The china cabinet at $215, the large dining table at $174, the service for twelve nobody in the family has room for. This is the most reliably unsold category in estate work anywhere.
The bedrooms. Mattress and box spring sets at $192, dressers at $169 to $199, wardrobes of clothing that bag at $47 each.
Paper, everywhere. Decades of records, correspondence and photographs — boxes at $47, filing cabinets at $101. This is the category to slow down for.
The piano. An upright at $390. Many of these houses have one, almost none of them sell, and it's the item families spend longest hoping about.
Documents, photographs, cash, jewellery, medication and mail are set aside and given back — not loaded, not sorted later, not kept.
In a house held for decades these appear constantly and in unlikely places: inside books, in coat pockets, taped behind drawers, at the bottom of a box nobody has opened since the seventies. A crew that isn't watching for them will throw away a deed, which is why watching for them is part of the work rather than a courtesy.
What you can do that helps most: name what must not be removed, in writing, before the first visit. A marked room, a specific dresser, a closet. Crews can follow an instruction; they cannot infer sentiment.
Stated plainly because the temptation runs the other way.
We do not appraise and we do not offer valuations. An itemised haul receipt is not an appraisal. Anyone in this trade offering to tell you what your mother's china is worth is doing something other than junk removal, and a family under pressure is exactly who that costs.
Valuation belongs with a certified appraiser, and it belongs before we arrive — which is another reason the four-pass order matters. If there's any question about whether something is valuable, that question gets answered in pass one, not discovered in pass four.
Every estate anywhere involves volume and sorting. Here it also involves the building.
A three-decker estate means the contents of three floors down one staircase. A single-family in the streetcar suburbs means a floored attic and a full basement, so the carry runs in both directions. And the same landing turns that stop a sofa on an ordinary job stop the same sofa on an estate job. What actually stops furniture on Boston stairs.
What matters for the quote: none of that changes the price. Access is absorbed, which on a multi-truck estate is a substantial amount of work not being billed to a family.
| Scope | Flat price |
|---|---|
| A single room | $325 |
| Half truck | $580 |
| Three-quarter truck | $790 |
| Full 16-cu-yd truck | $985 |
| Two trucks | $1,790 |
| Three trucks | $2,685 |
| Upright piano | $390 |
| China cabinet | $215 |
| Refrigerator / washer | $221 / $179 |
| Mattress and box spring set | $192 |
Every additional truck is the same flat rate rather than escalating — the third truck costs what the first did. That matters for estates specifically, because the total is a known multiple quoted before the work rather than a number that grows as the house reveals itself. Full price list · itemised Boston jobs.
Estate work involves pauses. A family member finds something and stops. A decision that seemed settled gets reopened. Someone needs ten minutes.
An hourly meter turns every one of those into money, which puts a price on grief and pressures people to hurry through the exact moments they shouldn't. Flat pricing removes that entirely — the pauses are free, because the number was fixed before anyone arrived.
If you're comparing companies for estate work, that's the question worth asking first. The questions that sort any hauler.
A fifty-year house is rarely a single day, and more importantly it usually shouldn't be.
Staged visits price identically to one marathon — same flat rate per truck, no penalty for splitting. So the schedule can be set by what the family can handle rather than by what's cheapest, which is unusual in this industry and worth using.
A common shape: attic and basement first, since that's the volume and the least emotionally difficult; then the main rooms once decisions have settled; then a final pass after the family has walked through one more time.
A large share of Boston estate work is run by someone in another state.
The mechanics are straightforward: photographs from whoever has access — a realtor, a neighbour, a relative — with the quote, booking and payment handled remotely, and photographs of empty rooms sent when it's done.
What matters more at a distance: being explicit in writing about what must not be removed, and asking for the documentation up front rather than reconstructing it later.
What we provide: an itemised receipt, donation receipts on request, and photographs of rooms when empty. What we don't: anything about probate. Deadlines, procedure and what an executor may or must do belong with the estate's attorney, and we'd rather say so than guess on a page.
Estates produce a higher share of genuinely usable goods than most jobs, which makes the routing worth doing properly.
Sound furniture and household goods route to donation, with receipts available for the estate file. Metal goes to scrap recovery. Electronics to certified processing — and anything with an account on it should be reset first. Refrigerant appliances get certified recovery.
Mattresses route to recycling under the Massachusetts restriction rather than to ordinary disposal. How that works · electronics rules.
And the honest part: the remainder — worn upholstery, damaged furniture, decades of paper — goes to disposal. In a fifty-year house that's a real share of the volume, and no routing decision changes it.
Most of the hidden volume. Slow to handle, rarely visible in photos. Budget for more than the hatch suggests.
Second-largest, plus appliances. Refrigerator $221, washer $179. Winter damage is likely.
China cabinet $215, large table $174. Reliably unsold; donation is the good outcome.
Mattress set $192, dresser $169–$199. Mattresses have no free route.
Sofa $170, and upholstery has no free route here either. Sofa types compared.
$47 a box. Slow down here — this is where cash and documents hide.
$390 upright. Decide early; almost none sell.
$47 a bag. Often the most donatable category in the house.
Not our truck. Household hazardous waste routes separately — and a basement workbench usually has decades of it.
Two to three trucks, $1,790–$2,685, staged over visits at no extra cost. Estate cleanout service.
Do the paper pass before the first truck. Everything else on this page can be revisited — a price re-quoted, a visit rescheduled, a decision deferred to the next pass. The one thing that cannot be undone is a load leaving with something in it that mattered. Walk the house for documents and photographs first, name in writing what must not be touched, and let the volume be the last problem rather than the first. It's the part that's actually simple.
Free quote from photos — staged visits, itemised receipts, no hourly meter
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