A Home Cleanout Checklist for a Rochester House

A home cleanout is a job you can absolutely do yourself. What sinks people is not the work, it is the order. They start in the biggest room, fill the container with the lightest material on day one, and then discover the basement on day four with nowhere left to put it.

This is a sequenced checklist for a Rochester house. It assumes what most houses here are: pre-1980, full basement, floored attic, a garage that has never once held two cars. Work it top to bottom and the whole thing takes a long weekend instead of a month. Call (585) 514-5622 when you know your dates.

Where City service ends and a roll-off starts

Start by being clear about what the City will and will not take, because guessing here wastes a week.

City Code § 20-12A provides “one City-issued container for the sole purpose of refuse storage.” One container, for household refuse. Under § 20-14 that container is stored in the rear or side yard. Under § 20-15B it is set out between the sidewalk and the curb, or alongside the roadway, and no earlier than the night before your collection day.

That is a system built for the weekly output of a household. It is not built for the contents of a basement. The City picks up leaves in the fall through the Department of Environmental Services. It does not pick up your deck, your shingles, or forty years of storage. That is where a roll-off starts.

There is a second line worth knowing if you are hiring the work out rather than doing it yourself. City Code § 20-15F says: “Contractors performing work must make arrangements for the proper and legal collection and disposal of waste generated during the construction process and such waste shall not be collected by the City.” If a contractor is tearing anything out of your house, that debris is theirs to haul, and a container is how it happens. Current City refuse information is at the City of Rochester.

Two weeks out: the planning pass

Do this before you book anything.

1. Walk the whole house with a notebook. Every room, the basement, the attic, the garage, the shed. Write down what is coming out, room by room. Do not sort yet.
2. Flag the heavy items now: appliances, cast-iron radiators, a workbench, a treadmill, a hot tub cover, storm windows. Those decide your container size more than the boxes do.
3. Flag the items that cannot legally ride. Full list below. Count them.
4. Book the donation pickup, if you are using one. Their calendar is less flexible than ours.
5. Line up help. Two people move roughly twice as much as one, and three move roughly four times as much, because two can carry while one loads.
6. Pick your container dates. Give yourself a day of slack at the end. Everybody needs it.

One week out: the errand pass

Take the banned material out of the house before the container arrives. This is the single best thing you can do for your own weekend.

New York does not run one master waste-ban list. It runs product-specific bans, each in its own title of the Environmental Conservation Law, and a Rochester house usually holds several.

• Electronics — banned from the trash since 1 January 2015 under ECL Article 27, Title 26. Televisions, monitors, towers, printers.
• Rechargeable batteries — illegal in the trash under Title 18, and a 2025 amendment added e-bike and e-scooter batteries.
• Tires — land burial prohibited under Title 19.
• Mercury thermostats — disposal banned since 2005 under Title 29.
• Paint, stain and varnish — New York’s paint stewardship program has run since May 2022 under Title 20, with free drop-off at participating sites.
• Solvents, fuel, pesticides, pool chemicals, propane tanks, fluorescent tubes, sharps and medication — household hazardous waste and specialty items.

Almost all of it goes to the Monroe County ecopark, 10 Avion Drive, Rochester, NY 14624. Open Wednesday 1:00 to 6:30 pm and Saturday 7:30 am to 1:00 pm, closed holidays, for use by Monroe County residents only. The rule that catches people: household hazardous waste needs an appointment. Electronics, appliances, scrap metal, propane tanks, fluorescent lights, rechargeable batteries, pharmaceuticals, sharps and textiles are walk-in. Some items are fee-based, credit or debit only. Check the current list with Monroe County before you load the car.

While you are at it, sort the recycling properly

A cleanout produces a mountain of cardboard and paper, and Monroe County’s curbside rules are specific. Cardboard flattened, no bigger than two feet by four feet. Shredded paper in brown paper bags only. Lids and caps reattached on bottles, jugs, jars and tubs. To-go cups only if clear or white. Not accepted: plastic bags, black plastic, foam egg cartons, coffee pods, straws, utensils, prescription bottles, clamshells, cord and food waste. The County publishes a consumer guide called the Recyclopedia if you want the full list.

The four-category sort

Every item gets one of four answers, decided once. Handling something twice is where the hours go.

• Keep. It goes back where it lives, today, not into a pile called later.
• Sell or give. It leaves the property on a date you have already set. If nobody has taken it by that date, it becomes load.
• Recycle or ecopark. Staged in the garage during the errand pass.
• Load. Into the container.

The only rule that matters: no fifth category. The pile of undecided things is what turns a weekend into a season.

Be realistic about the sell-or-give column. Most household furniture from the 1980s and 1990s has no resale market, and listing it costs you a week of waiting for someone who never shows. Donation organizations have their own standards and most of them will not take upholstered furniture, mattresses, particle-board case goods, exercise equipment or anything with a tear or a stain. Call and ask what they actually accept before you set anything aside for them. If the answer is no, it is load, and knowing that on Tuesday is worth more than hoping about it until Sunday.

Anything genuinely wearable is a different story. Textiles are walk-in at the ecopark, clothing banks take bagged clothing, and shoes and coats move fast in this city in October. That is a twenty-minute errand that keeps several contractor bags out of the container.

Room by room, in this order

Attic first

Bulky, light, and it empties the fastest. Boxed paper, holiday storage, luggage, furniture that was disassembled to get up there. In a balloon-framed Rochester house the attic floor is often loose boards over the joists with plaster ceiling below, so watch where you step. In summer, work from six to eleven and quit.

Bedrooms and closets

Clothing, linens, shoes. Bag by category as you go — donate bags and load bags, nothing mixed. Textiles are walk-in at the ecopark, which is a better answer than the container for anything wearable.

Living and dining rooms

The furniture. Take the legs off tables, pull drawers out of case pieces and carry them separately, and cut down anything that will nest. A sofa cut into three sections takes up a third of the space of a whole one, and you are not selling it.

Bathrooms

Fast, but check under the sink. That cabinet is where solvents, drain chemicals and expired medication hide, and all three are errand-pass items, not container items.

Kitchen

Slow and high volume. Small appliances, cookware, stored containers, the drawer nobody has opened since 2009. Open every canister and jar before it loads.

Garage and shed

Tools, lawn equipment, lumber offcuts, tires, fuel. Drain the mower and the trimmer before anything goes near the can. Scrap metal is walk-in at the ecopark and worth pulling out.

Basement last

The heaviest material, and by now the path to the door is clear. Cast-iron radiators and soil pipe, wood storm windows stacked behind the stairs, shop-built shelving, a laundry sink, carpet from the rec room. If plaster and lath is coming down as part of this, read our piece on basement and attic cleanouts first — plaster fills a container by weight long before it fills it by volume.

One caution. Pre-1974 basements here commonly have 9×9 vinyl floor tile and wrapped insulation on old pipe and boilers. Both are asbestos suspects. We do not take asbestos in our containers, and in New York it moves under a separate NYSDEC Part 364 permit with a licensed contractor under the Department of Labor’s Industrial Code Rule 56. Leave it and ask.

Yard, deck and porch

Brush, old fencing, a rotted deck section, patio furniture, the swing set nobody has used in eight years. Keep clean brush separate from mixed debris if you can — it loads differently and it is cheaper to handle clean.

Sizing the container

Dimensions and weight guidance are on the container sizes page, and the sizing guide works through it room by room. Between two sizes, take the larger. The extra yardage costs less than a second haul.

Loading, in the right order

1. Heavy and low first. Spread dense material flat across the floor of the container rather than piling it at the door end.
2. Flat and rigid next, standing on edge along the walls. Doors, shelving, table tops, plywood.
3. Bulky light material broken down so it nests.
4. Loose fill last, into the gaps.
5. Nothing above the top rail. A load standing proud of the rail cannot be tarped and cannot legally go down the road.

Use the walk-in door at the back rather than throwing everything over the side. It is faster, it packs tighter, and it is how you avoid a trip to the emergency room on a Saturday. Swing the door fully open, pin it, and keep a clear lane from the house to the opening. If the ground drops away behind the container, put a ramp board down before you start carrying, not after somebody stumbles.

Two loading habits save real volume. Break anything with a frame — take the shelving apart, cut the sofa, collapse the boxes, remove the legs. And fill the corners deliberately. An unpacked container carries about two thirds of what a packed one does, and the yardage you paid for is the yardage you should use.

Placement day

We need about 10.5 feet of clear width at the placement, roughly 60 feet of straight approach, and better than 20 feet of clear overhead. That last one matters here: Rochester has a mature street canopy, and the electric service drop to the house runs under those limbs. Stand where you want the box, look straight up, and tell us what is there.

We lay plywood under every wheel and under the rails on every driveway placement. Monroe County sits on silt loams — Collamer and Niagara, with Honeoye as the signature series — that hold water and soften as frost comes out of the ground in March and April.

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

Winter jobs get one extra instruction: tarp it. Rochester averages 102.0 inches of snow a year, about 27.4 inches of it in January over roughly 18 snow days. Snow in an open container is weight you pay to haul.

Finishing the job

Walk it once more before you call for the pickup. The eaves in the attic, behind the furnace, the crawl space under the front porch, the rafters over the garage door. Something is always still there.

Then check the load. Level with the rail, nothing hanging over the side, nothing sticking up. Clear the approach again if it has snowed. Move the cars out of the run and unlatch the gate again, because it will have swung shut sometime during the week. Then call and we will come get it.

Take photographs of the empty rooms before you put anything back. If the house is being listed, refinanced or turned over to a tenant, you will be glad to have them, and they settle any later question about what condition the place was in when the container left.

If you would rather not touch any of it, we also do the loading. That is what our residential service is for. Either way, call (585) 514-5622 and tell us the house, the rooms and the week.