Renovation debris removal in Baltimore

The short answer

For mixed loads the truck-fill ladder applies: quarter $241, half $431, full $732. Visit minimum $75.

Weight versus volume, and why it matters here

Household junk is bulky and light. Renovation debris is the opposite, and the difference decides how it should be priced and hauled.

A truck fills by volume, but it also has a weight limit, and dense material reaches that limit long before the truck looks full. That is why masonry has its own line at $219 per quarter truck rather than riding on the general ladder: a quarter truck of broken concrete weighs more than a full truck of furniture.

Baltimore makes this concrete, so to speak, because of what these houses are built from. Plaster over wood lath, solid brick party walls, and formstone on the front. Strip a room back and you generate an enormous tonnage of dense rubble from what looked like a modest wall.

Practical rule: bag heavy material and keep the bags small. A contractor bag is $41, ten are $132, twenty are $259. A bag you cannot lift is a bag nobody can lift.

The Baltimore rowhouse gut

The standard renovation in this city has a standard debris profile, and it comes out in this order.

• Plaster and lath. The big one. Dusty, heavy, full of nails, and it comes out of three floors down one narrow staircase.
• Old flooring. Layers, usually. Linoleum over hardboard over an original floor, sometimes with adhesive.
• Kitchen carcasses. Cabinets that were built in and do not come out gracefully. Countertops price separately: $56 per laminate section, $111 per stone section.
• Bathroom fixtures. Cast iron bathtub $185, fiberglass bathtub $90, detached toilet $64, vanity $69. A full bathroom strip of tub, toilet and vanity is $185 + $64 + $69 = $318.
• Cast iron radiators, when a house comes off its old heating system. $123 each, and every one of them is a two-person lift down a stair that was not designed for it.
• Carpet. Rolled $68, or $71 per room if we are pulling it.

Two things to check before you swing a hammer

Lead paint. Baltimore's housing stock is overwhelmingly pre-war, and lead paint is a genuine and regulated concern in this state, particularly in rental property. There are specific legal requirements around disturbing painted surfaces in older homes, and they are not optional. Check the current rules that apply to your property and use appropriately certified contractors for the work. This is not a junk removal question, it is a do-not-start-without-checking question.

Asbestos. Older floor tiles, adhesives, pipe insulation and some board products can contain it. If anything looks like a candidate, have it assessed before demolition. No removal crew will handle suspected asbestos, and no honest one will pretend otherwise.

We haul debris. We do not do abatement, and material that needs specialist handling has to be dealt with by a licensed contractor first.

Staging on a rowhouse block

Where do you put the debris between demolition and collection? In a house with a garage this is trivial. In a fourteen-foot-wide rowhome with no driveway it needs planning.

• Do not stage it in the alley. Debris in a Baltimore alley is illegal dumping, it attracts more within days, and it traces back to the property.
• The back yard is usually the answer, bagged and covered, if there is one.
• Keep the stair clear. If the staircase becomes the staging area, the trades stop working.
• Bag as you go. Loose plaster swept into a pile at the end of the week is twice the job and half of it ends up on the floor.

Getting it out

Front or back, and for heavy material the back is usually better because it keeps it off your marble steps.

Whether that works depends on the alley: many are one vehicle wide with parking pads and poles narrowing them, and some are blocked by parked cars by evening. Tell us whether there is a rear gate and whether the alley is passable. If nothing can get behind the house, the crew carries to the nearest legal stop, with the steps covered and boards down.

There is no stair fee and no long-carry fee, which matters on a job where every bag comes down three flights.

Container or removal?

If the demolition runs for days and you have somewhere legal to site a container, a container is the right partner to that work. Note that placing one on a public street typically requires a city permit, and on a permit-parking block it takes spaces your neighbors need.

If the debris already exists and you want it gone in one visit, a removal is simpler and the labor is included. A lot of Baltimore renovations use both: a container during demolition, then a removal at the end for the mixed material the container is not the right home for.

Booking it

Tell us what the material is, roughly how much, which floor it is on, and whether it is bagged. Heavy material should be quoted as masonry rather than general debris, because that is what it is.

You get a price before the visit, and it does not change when the crew sees how many flights of stairs are involved.

Frequently asked questions