What a garage cleanout costs in San Francisco

The San Francisco garage is a specific thing

In most of the country a garage is a detached or side-attached box you drive into. Here it is structural — the bottom floor of a Victorian, Edwardian or mid-century house, with the living floors stacked on top and a roll-up door opening straight onto the pavement.

That shape creates the pattern we see over and over:

• It is the only storage in the building, so it holds everything the flat above cannot — holiday decorations, the bikes, the tools, the boxes from the last three moves, the exercise equipment bought in a burst of optimism.
• It is frequently narrow and deep, or tandem, so the back half has not been reachable in years.
• Half of them have been partly converted — a laundry, a workshop, a bedroom, an in-law unit — which means there is now framing, plasterboard and a door in the way of everything behind it.
• It is cold and damp. Concrete floors wick, fog rolls in, and cardboard boxes sitting directly on that slab for a decade come up soft and spotted.

Two ways to price it

By item works when you can name what is going. You get the exact total before we dispatch.

By truck fill works when you cannot — which is most garages. The ladder is published:

A typical one-car San Francisco garage that has not been cleared in a decade is a half to three-quarter truck. A tandem garage, or one from a rent-controlled flat with a long tenancy behind it, is regularly a full truck and occasionally more than one load.

The $95 minimum still applies to small jobs. If all that is going is a small junk pile at $82, the visit is $95.

Item prices for the things that are actually in there

Garage contents are remarkably consistent across this city:

• Small Junk Pile: $82  |  Medium Junk Pile: $129  |  Large Junk Pile: $208
• Metal Shelving: $71  |  Storage Cabinet: $74  |  Rolling Tool Chest / Workbench: $100
• Bicycle: $37  |  E-Bike / Electric Scooter: $56  |  Kayak / Canoe / Paddleboard: $71
• Ladder: $33  |  Yard / Hand Tool: $33  |  Lawn Mower: $65
• Paint (1-Gallon Can): $30  |  Paint (5-Gallon Bucket): $52
• Tire (Single): $22  |  Tires (set of 4): $87
• Moving Box: $31  |  Box of Books: $45  |  Trash Bag (33-55 gal): $35  |  Contractor Bag: $41
• 10 Bags of Debris: $132  |  20 Bags of Debris: $259  |  30 Bags of Debris: $385
• Treadmill: $115  |  Weight Bench: $69  |  Weight Set / Free Weights: $93
• Mini Fridge: $115  |  Chest Freezer: $146
• Artificial Christmas Tree: $37  |  Storage Trunk / Chest: $71

Worked examples from real San Francisco garages

Outer Sunset, one-car garage, ten years of boxes. Large junk pile plus two sets of metal shelving plus a bicycle: $208 + $71 + $71 + $37 = $387.

Bernal Heights, tandem garage being emptied for a conversion. Half truck at $431 covered the whole contents in one load.

Richmond District, garage laundry plus storage. Washer, dryer and a large junk pile: $133 + $128 + $208 = $469.

Excelsior, the exercise equipment graveyard. Treadmill, weight bench and free weights: $115 + $69 + $93 = $277.

Noe Valley, long tenancy, nobody could enumerate it. Three-quarter truck at $587.

All of those are complete numbers. Disposal is inside them, labor is inside them, and there is no stair charge even where the crew had to bring things down from the flat above to add to the load.

The access questions that actually matter here

Garage jobs are usually the easy access case in San Francisco, because the door opens onto the street. What complicates them is the street itself.

• The grade. On a steep block a truck cannot casually reverse into position, and the roll-up door may be the only flat surface for fifty feet. Tell us the cross street and we will plan the approach.
• One-way blocks. Large parts of the Mission, the Marina, Telegraph Hill and Potrero Hill are one-way. Getting it wrong costs the crew a fifteen-minute loop, not you any money, but it is better to know.
• Street cleaning. Most blocks have a posted window. Working across it is how a neighbor ends up unhappy. We will schedule around yours if you tell us what it is.
• Permit zones. A truck can generally stand to load, but it cannot sit all afternoon in a residential permit zone. This is a reason we prefer to arrive with the crew size the job actually needs.

Damp, mold and what a decade on a concrete slab does

San Francisco's climate is gentle on people and hard on stored goods. The fog belt west of Twin Peaks is the worst of it, but nowhere in the city is really dry, and an unheated garage with an unsealed roll-up door sits close to outdoor humidity year-round.

What that means practically: cardboard boxes stacked on the slab will have wicked moisture and may fail when lifted. Upholstered furniture stored in a garage — a spare sofa, a mattress, an armchair — is frequently past donation by the time anyone looks at it again. Timber furniture swells and the joints let go. Anything with a motor that has sat for years has usually corroded.

This is worth knowing before you plan a garage clear around donating things. Walk down with a torch and check the bottom of the stack first, because the bottom of the stack is where the answer is.

Converting the garage instead of clearing it

A large share of the garage clears we run in San Francisco are the first step of a conversion — an in-law unit, an accessory dwelling, a home office, a studio for the adult child who is not leaving. Those jobs come in two waves and it is cheaper to plan them that way.

Wave one is the contents: boxes, shelving, bikes, the old fridge. Wave two is the construction debris once the framing and plasterboard start. For wave two the relevant prices are Construction Debris at $120, Drywall per sheet or small bundle at $37, Lumber / Wood Scrap bundle at $41, and Concrete / Masonry Debris per quarter truck at $219.

Booking them as two visits usually beats trying to hold a part-loaded truck across a build.

Frequently asked questions