Basement and Attic Cleanouts in Rochester, New York

Most houses in this city sit on a full basement, and most of those basements have been filling up since before the Second World War. More than half of Rochester’s housing was built before 1940, and roughly nine houses in ten predate 1980. So when you finally prop open the door at the bottom of the stairs and start hauling, you are not clearing out a decade of storage. You are clearing out a century of it.

We have run roll-offs out of the west side since 2011, and the basement-and-attic job is the most common residential call we take inside the city line. This is what that job actually looks like here: what comes out of an old Rochester house, what the material weighs, what size container it takes, and what the law will not let you put in it. If you want to talk through a specific address, call (585) 514-5622.

Why a Rochester basement fills the way it does

Full basements are near-universal in Monroe County. That is not true in much of the country, and it changes the shape of the job. A house built on a slab has an attic and a garage. A house built here has an attic, a garage, and eight hundred square feet of dry-ish floor under the whole footprint that nobody has looked at properly since 1978.

The oldest stock sits on stone and rubble foundations. Houses built before about 1930 are commonly balloon framed. Inside the walls you will find knob-and-tube wiring, cast-iron drain-waste-vent stacks, and galvanized supply lines. None of that is exotic here. It is the default condition.

What actually comes out

On a typical pre-1940 city basement we load some combination of:

• A decommissioned boiler or furnace, plus the old oil tank fittings and the cut sections of the octopus ductwork that fed the original gravity system.
• Cast-iron soil pipe and radiators. A single standing radiator can run several hundred pounds, and there is usually more than one leaning in a corner.
• Wood storm windows and screens, stacked six deep behind the stairs, most of them painted shut and none of them matching the current sash.
• Shelving built out of full-dimension lumber, workbenches bolted to the joists, and a laundry sink on a cast-iron pedestal.
• Plaster and lath from an earlier partial remodel, still bagged or still piled, because somebody started a project in 1994 and stopped.
• Carpet, pad, and the tack strip from a finished rec room that flooded once and never dried right.
• Paint, thinner, old fuel, garden chemicals and a coffee can of unidentified liquid on a shelf above the bench. That last category does not ride in our container. More on that below.

Plaster and lath is what decides your container

If there is one thing that separates a Rochester cleanout from the same job in a newer market, it is plaster. Drywall is light and it breaks into panels. Plaster on wood lath is dense, it is often three coats, and it comes down in chunks with nails and horsehair binder in it. It fills a container by weight long before it fills it by volume.

Volume versus weight

Every roll-off has two limits. One is the top rail. The other is what the truck and the road can legally carry. On a clean household cleanout of furniture, boxes and clothing, you will hit the rail first and the container will go out light. On anything with plaster, tile, brick or a stone-foundation repair in it, you hit the weight limit with the container half full.

The practical answer is not a bigger can. It is a smarter load. Put the heavy material in low and spread it across the floor of the container rather than piling it at the door end. Break the bulky light material down so it nests. If the job is genuinely heavy from the first hour — a full plaster gut, a chimney takedown, a rubble-foundation repair — the right call is a 10-yard container run twice, not a 30-yard you cannot legally haul. We would rather tell you that on the phone than at the curb.

The attic is the opposite problem

Where the basement is heavy, the attic is bulky. A Rochester attic is usually reached by a pull-down or a narrow walk-up stair off a back bedroom, and everything in it went up the same way it has to come down. Expect furniture that was disassembled to get through the opening, boxed paper, holiday storage, luggage, framed art, and mattresses that were carried up when the kids moved out.

Two attic notes worth knowing. First, the heat. A city attic under a dark roof in July is genuinely dangerous to work in past ten in the morning. Start at six, quit at eleven, take the afternoon off, and put a box fan in the gable end pointed out. Second, the ceiling below. In a balloon-framed house the attic floor is often just loose boards laid over the joists, and the ceiling underneath is plaster. Step wrong and you have added a plaster repair to the project.

If you find loose-fill insulation you do not recognize, or wrapped pipe insulation running through the attic or the basement, stop moving it and read the next section before you do anything else.

Asbestos: an exemption is not a pass

New York regulates asbestos through the Department of Labor, not the environmental agency. The rule is 12 NYCRR Part 56, known as Industrial Code Rule 56, and it requires an asbestos survey before demolition, renovation, remodeling or repair. There is a narrow carve-out for the owner of a one- or two-family dwelling who, in the rule’s words, “contracts for, but does not direct or control the work.” There are also survey exemptions for agricultural buildings, for structures certified structurally unsound, and for buildings whose original construction commenced after 1 January 1974.

Here is the part people get backwards. The Department of Labor states it plainly:

“Buildings qualifying for exemptions must still be assumed to contain asbestos and demolished as an asbestos project unless there is a survey that appropriately documents that there is no asbestos.”

An exemption from the survey is not an exemption from the rules. It is a presumption that the material is there, which costs more than testing would have. And in Rochester, the 1974 date does not help most houses. The pre-1974 stock in this city is full of 9×9 vinyl asbestos floor tile in basements and back halls, and asbestos pipe and boiler insulation on the old gravity systems.

Our policy is simple and it is not negotiable: we do not accept asbestos in our containers. Asbestos in New York moves under a separate NYSDEC Part 364 permit and has to be handled by a licensed asbestos contractor working under Part 56. Start at the New York State Department of Labor if you are not sure where your job lands.

Sizing: the 20-yard is the Rochester default

For a full basement and attic clear-out on a city house, the 20-yard is the container we drop most often. It takes a mixed household load without running out of room, and its footprint still fits a normal city driveway. The exceptions run in both directions.

Full container sizes are listed on the site, and the sizing guide walks through the math room by room. If the house has been in one family for fifty years, size up. Nobody has ever finished one of these jobs and wished for a smaller can.

What cannot go in the container

New York does not run a single waste-ban list. It runs product-specific bans, each one in its own title of the Environmental Conservation Law, and several of them will show up in an old basement.

• Electronics. Banned from the trash since 1 January 2015 under ECL Article 27, Title 26. That includes the CRT television in the corner and the tower under the workbench.
• Rechargeable batteries. Illegal to throw in the trash under Title 18. Power tool packs, laptop cells, and as of a 2025 amendment, e-bike and e-scooter batteries.
• Mercury thermostats. Disposal banned since 2005 under Title 29. If you pulled the round thermostat off the wall when the boiler came out, it goes to a collection program.
• Waste tires. Land burial is prohibited under Title 19, and there are almost always four in the back of a Rochester garage.
• Paint, solvent, fuel, pesticide. Household hazardous waste. Paint has its own route — New York’s paint stewardship program has run since May 2022 under ECL Article 27, Title 20.

The place all of that goes is the Monroe County ecopark, 10 Avion Drive, Rochester, NY 14624. It is open Wednesday 1:00 to 6:30 pm and Saturday 7:30 am to 1:00 pm, and it is for Monroe County residents only. The distinction that trips people up: an appointment is required for household hazardous waste, but electronics, appliances, scrap metal, propane tanks, fluorescent lights, rechargeable batteries, sharps and textiles are walk-in. Some items carry a fee and the site takes credit or debit only. Details are on the Monroe County site.

Plan the ecopark run before the container arrives, not after. Sorting hazardous material out of a half-loaded can is miserable work.

Getting the container to the house

City lots are narrow and the driveways that came with them are narrow too. We need roughly ten and a half feet of width to set a container down cleanly, about sixty feet of straight approach to run the truck in and tilt the box off, and better than twenty feet of clear overhead.

That last one matters more here than people expect. Rochester has a mature street canopy, and under those limbs runs the service drop to the house. We will not put a raised bed into a service drop or a limb, and if the only approach is under one, we will find another spot or come back with a different plan.

On the driveway itself we lay plywood under every wheel and under the rails, every placement, no exceptions. Monroe County sits on silt loams — Collamer and Niagara, with Honeoye as the signature series — and those soils hold water. In March and April, when frost is coming out of the ground, an asphalt driveway over that subgrade is at its softest of the year. The full story is in our piece on driveway protection.

A container sitting entirely on your own driveway is generally outside the City’s right-of-way permit requirement at City Code § 104-24. If any part of it touches the sidewalk, the tree lawn or the street, you need a written permit from the City Engineer — and under § 104-24(C) the obstruction has to be barricaded and lit after dark. In December, sunset here is before five o’clock.

Working the job in order

The people who finish these jobs in a weekend all work roughly the same way.

1. Walk the whole basement and the whole attic first, with a light, before anything moves. Make three piles in your head: keep, donate, load.
2. Pull the banned material out first and stage it in the garage. Electronics, batteries, thermostats, tires, paint, chemicals. Book the ecopark appointment for the hazardous items now.
3. Clear the path. Get the stairs, the bulkhead and the walk to the driveway open and swept before the container lands. Every trip you make later uses that path.
4. Load heavy and low first. Cast iron, plaster, tile, anything dense, spread flat across the floor of the container.
5. Then bulky light material, broken down so it nests. Break the shelving. Fold the boxes. Take the legs off the table.
6. Finish with the loose material that fills gaps. Do not load above the top rail. A load that sits proud of the rail cannot be tarped and cannot legally go down the road.

If the job is bigger than the weekend you have for it, we also do the loading. That is what our junk removal service is for.

If you are doing this in January

Rochester averages 102.0 inches of snow a year, the highest normal of any large American metro, and January alone brings 27.4 inches over about 17.6 snow days. That is the operational fact nobody outside the snow belt has to think about: snow in an open container is weight you pay to haul. A can sitting in a city driveway in January gets snowed on roughly every other day.

So tarp it. Every night, and any time you break for more than a few hours. Keep the tarp weighted at the corners, because the wind off Lake Ontario will take it otherwise. And shovel the approach before we come back for the pickup — the truck needs the same sixty feet in February that it needed in September.

Ready to schedule, or want to talk through what is down there first? Call (585) 514-5622. Tell us the age of the house, whether the basement is full or finished, and whether plaster is coming down. We will size it with you on the phone.