Locally Owned Dumpster Rental in Roanoke Since 2012

Wade Hollins grew up in this valley, in a bungalow off Williamson Road, and went to work for a local remodeling crew out of school. He spent most of his twenties under houses and in attics — cutting out termite-eaten sill plate and band joist, stripping shingles in July, breaking out old flatwork, and pulling down porches and back steps from Melrose-Rugby across to Garden City — watching the same problems repeat themselves. The container never came when it was supposed to. When it did, the invoice had grown. Nobody ever warns a homeowner that a crawlspace full of wet framing weighs far more than the pile looks, or that the spoil out of a footing dig will hit legal transport weight in a box that still looks half empty, so the can that sounded generous on the phone is at payload while it is half full, and then it sits in the driveway too heavy to move.

In 2012 he bought a used roll-off truck and four cans, parked them on 3783 Peters Creek Rd, and started answering the phone himself. Wade still takes most of the calls and still runs the dispatch board. The first job was a shingle tear-off on a foursquare in Raleigh Court for an owner whose previous hauler had canceled twice while the crew stood on the roof waiting. She still calls us, and she still tells the story.

Word moved the way it does here — through contractors, through neighbors, through the man at the supply counter who mentions that the dumpster people actually showed up. Then two things settled it: storm weeks, when an ice storm or the remnants of a tropical system come over the Blue Ridge and put a fortnight of roof, ceiling and tree work on the books over a weekend; and the long spring stretch, when freeze-thaw damage, crawlspace repairs and rot work all land inside the same few weeks and every crew in Southwest Virginia wants a can at once. We added trucks as the calls came in rather than borrowing against volume we did not have yet. 14 years on we run a small fleet, we still dispatch from 3783 Peters Creek Rd, and the phone still rings at a desk with somebody local behind it.

Why we care about getting the quote right

The dumpster industry has an image problem and it is largely self-inflicted. Low teaser rates, a tonnage allowance buried in the fine print, then a bill with an overage charge nobody explained. We priced against that from day one. When you call, we ask what you are throwing away, what it weighs, how long you need it and where it is going. Then we give you a number that includes delivery, pickup, the rental window and disposal. If we think you are about to order the wrong size, we say so — even when the wrong size is the more expensive one.

What being local actually buys you

It is not a slogan. It means our dispatcher knows which hillside drives in South Roanoke, Grandin Court and Cave Spring are too steep to set a loaded box on and which ones just need a smaller can; which blocks in Old Southwest, Gainsboro and Belmont have a narrow street and a rear alley, so the box goes at the head of the drive; which addresses sit on a City of Roanoke street and therefore need the City’s Dumpster/Portable Storage Container Permit from the Transportation Division, and which sit on a Roanoke County subdivision street where the road is usually VDOT’s and the question goes to the Salem District instead; which are actually in Salem or the Town of Vinton and answer to a fourth desk; which lots sit on karst ground where a loaded box is a point load worth thinking about; which gravel pads a loaded truck should not commit to for a day or two after heavy rain; and roughly what a 1940s city house with a crawlspace, a packed attic, a back shed and three generations of storage produces when it finally gets cleared out. It means that when a storm comes through Southwest Virginia and half the valley wants a container in the same week, our trucks are already here.

We have seen the mistakes so you do not have to

The four that cost people the most money, in order: sizing by volume when the debris is dense, because broken concrete, brick, wet termite-damaged framing and footing spoil all hit payload while the box still looks half empty; forgetting that an older city house has a crawlspace, an attic and often a basement in it, so a clearout that reads like a 20 on the main floor is really a 30 once the rest is counted; assuming the curb will absorb the overflow, when the City of Roanoke explicitly does not collect construction, demolition or remodeling debris under its Chapter 14.1 program, caps bulk at three items a week, and excludes contractor-cut brush, stumps and treated lumber outright; and treating a pre-1985 building as ordinary demolition, when Va. Code § 36-99.7 can put a licensed asbestos inspection in front of the building permit and the federal RRP rule sits over anything built before 1978. Every one of those is avoidable with one honest conversation before delivery.

We have cleared crawlspaces and attics out of houses that had not been emptied since the 1960s, rental turnovers in the city where a unit changes hands and forty years goes out in a fortnight, storm damage where the ceilings, the insulation and half the drywall came down before the roof went back on, porch and back-step rebuilds where the posts came up with their footings still attached, sill plate and band joist replacements where the framing came out wet and three times the weight anyone expected, basement work alongside an old heating oil tank that had to come out as a licensed job before anything else moved, limb wood run as clean separate loads of oak and maple after an ice storm, kitchen and bath gut-outs where the cabinets and drywall went straight into the can because the City will not take them at the curb, footing digs and foundation repairs that went out by weight rather than volume, restaurant and retail fit-outs downtown and out along the Southwest Virginia corridors, and estate cleanouts where a family had a fortnight to empty a house. Every one of those loads behaves differently at the scale house, and knowing that in advance is most of the job.

Credentials and cover

• Full commercial general liability and auto cover — certificates available on request for GCs and property managers, including the $1 million per occurrence naming the City of Roanoke as additional insured that a City street placement requires
• Workers’ compensation cover for every driver on the road
• Material taken only to facilities permitted under Virginia’s Solid Waste Management Regulations at 9VAC20-81
• Clean corrugated cardboard and scrap metal pulled out of loads and routed for recycling, which is what the 25 percent rate under Va. Code § 10.1-1411 asks of both the City of Roanoke and Roanoke County
• Liquids and asbestos kept out of every container, and mixed construction and demolition loads taken to a permitted processing facility rather than direct to disposal

Contractors and property managers: ask for our COI when you set up an account. We can usually have it emailed the same day.