What a garage cleanout costs in Boston

The short answer

Garage cleanouts price off the truck ladder, because a garage is a volume problem rather than a list of objects.

A tidy single bay where you still park the car and only the perimeter has silted up is generally a quarter truck at $325. A single bay that has not held a car in a decade is usually a half truck at $580. A two-bay in Newton or Watertown with a loft over it can reach the full truck at $985.

If what you actually have is six identifiable objects rather than a wall of stuff, price it by item instead and pay whichever is lower.

Garages are scarce here, which is exactly why they fill up

Most of Boston proper does not have a garage at all. What exists is specific: detached single bays off the alley behind two-families in West Roxbury, Roslindale and Hyde Park; tuck-under bays cut into the ground floor of Dorchester and South Boston houses; driveway-plus-bay setups once you get out to Medford, Watertown, Newton and Quincy.

Because off-street space in this city is worth real money, the garage gets treated as free storage rather than as somewhere to put a car. Then the car goes back on the street, and then in February you are out there at six in the morning digging it out of a snow bank while a perfectly good bay forty feet away holds a broken exercise bike and eleven years of paint cans.

That is the usual trigger for the call. People do not clear a Boston garage to tidy up. They clear it to get the car inside before the first real storm.

What is in a Boston garage

The contents are remarkably consistent across the city:

• Snow gear that has outlived itself. A snow blower that stopped starting three winters ago ($95), four shovels, a bag of solidified ice melt.
• Lawn gear for a yard the size of a rug. Mower $88, a string trimmer or blower $45 each, a wheelbarrow $50.
• Tires. Boston households keep snow tires, and then keep them after selling the car. $30 each, or $117 for a set of four.
• Paint. Every garage in New England has a shelf of half-used cans. A one-gallon can is $40, a five-gallon bucket $70.
• Bikes. $50 each, usually with flat tires and a seized chain.
• Shelving and a workbench. Metal shelving $95, a rolling tool chest or bench $135.
• The grill. Charcoal $79, propane $95. Take the tank off — a 20lb propane tank is $45 and goes separately.
• Leftover building materials. A bundle of lumber $55, a pallet $45, construction debris $162.

Two ways to price it, worked out

Item route. A typical Roslindale single bay: snow blower, mower, four tires, a metal shelving unit and a medium junk pile of everything else. That is $95 + $88 + $117 + $95 + $174 = $569.

Truck route. The same bay is a half truck at $580.

Those land within a few dollars of each other, which is normal — the two models are meant to agree. When they do not, you pay the lower one. The item route tends to win when the garage holds a few big identifiable machines and not much else. The truck route wins as soon as there is a genuine wall of boxes, bags and broken furniture, because nobody wants to itemize forty things.

A smaller job: a tuck-under bay in Dorchester holding a small junk pile and a dead bike is $110 + $50 = $160.

Tuck-under bays and the New England basement problem

A lot of Boston garages are not really garages. They are a bay cut into the foundation with a low header, a ramp down off the street, and a door into the basement at the back. Which means the garage and the basement have been quietly merging for years.

When you book, say which one you are actually clearing. The truck ladder prices the volume either way, but the crew plans differently for a basement carry — a bulkhead with four stone steps, a low beam you cannot stand under, and a floor that has been damp every spring since the house was built. Anything cardboard that has sat on a Boston basement floor through a few springs is heavier and softer than it looks.

None of that is a surcharge. It just changes how long the crew blocks for the job.

Where the truck parks, and why it matters more than you would think

A detached garage off a back alley in West Roxbury is the easy version: the truck backs down the alley and the carry is twenty feet. A tuck-under bay on a narrow Southie street is not. Resident permit parking, a street barely wide enough for two-way traffic, and often no legal place for a box truck outside your door.

In winter add snow banks, which quietly delete the only viable spot from December onward. The crew works around it — that is the job — but if you have a driveway, a wide spot, or a neighbor who will let the truck sit for forty minutes, mention it when you book. It makes the whole thing faster for everyone.

There is no charge for a difficult street. There never has been.

What cannot go on the truck

A garage is the one room where this actually comes up.

• Wet paint, solvents, thinners, gasoline and motor oil. These have their own household-hazardous routes. Check your municipality's current page for when and where it accepts them.
• Propane tanks with gas still in them. Empty tanks are fine at $45; full ones go back to an exchange.
• Car batteries. Retailers that sell them generally take them.

Paint cans that are genuinely empty and dried out are ordinary waste and go with everything else. If you want to speed that along, take the lids off the nearly-empty ones a week before the pickup and let them dry out in the garage.

When to book it

October and early November is the sensible window in Boston — after the yard work stops and before the first storm, while the bay is still dry and you can still open the door without shoveling. That is also when the porch furniture, the window AC units and the summer stuff come in, so you can clear the old to make room for the new in one visit.

Spring works too, once the ground is not frozen. The one window to avoid planning around is the last week of August into the first week of September, when the whole city is moving house at once and the calendar is tight.

Prices do not change by season. Only how fast the calendar fills does.

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