Cleanouts
Crawlspace and Basement Cleanouts in the Roanoke Valley
Crawlspaces are common in the Roanoke Valley and plenty of older city houses have basements. Here is what comes out of each, what it weighs, and which container to take.
Under most houses in the Roanoke Valley there is a hole. Sometimes it is a crawlspace you get into on your hands and knees through a hatch in a closet floor. Sometimes it is a full basement with a stair, a workbench and forty years of storage in it. Crawlspaces are common here, and plenty of older city houses have basements. Which one you have changes what comes out, what it weighs, and what size box we set on your driveway.
We have been pulling this material out of valley houses since 2012. Call us at (540) 685-0739 before you start and we will talk through what is down there. Ten minutes on the phone usually saves a second container.
Crawlspaces and basements are two different jobs
People lump them together because both are below the finished floor. On a job they behave nothing alike.
A crawlspace is a low, awkward, dirty space with eighteen to thirty-six inches of headroom, a dirt or gravel floor, and everything in it either torn loose or half-buried. What comes out is fallen batt insulation, shredded vapor barrier, collapsed duct board, rodent debris, leaf litter that blew in through a foundation vent, and sometimes spoil where somebody once dug a trench for a plumbing repair and never hauled the dirt away. It is not much in volume. It is filthy, wet, and heavier per bag than it looks.
A basement is a room. What comes out of a basement is contents first: furniture that got demoted from upstairs, a chest freezer that quit in 2009, paint cans, canning jars, carpet remnants, paneling, holiday boxes, an exercise bike. Then, if you are remodeling, the structure follows: paneling, drop ceiling, framing, old cabinetry.
Volume is not the problem in one and is the whole problem in the other
A crawlspace clean-out fills a small box with heavy material. A basement clean-out fills a big box with light material and then surprises you at the end when the appliances and the wet carpet go in. Plan the container around whichever pattern you are actually in. If your house has both, plan around the basement and expect the crawlspace to add a couple hundred pounds you did not budget for.
What comes out of a Roanoke crawlspace
Spoil, plastic and insulation
The material list is short and repetitive. Old six-mil poly, gray and brittle, usually torn into strips. Fiberglass batts that fell out of the joist bays years ago and have been lying face-down in the dirt since. Rigid duct board that came apart at the seams. Bags of dirt and gravel if the space is being dug down for headroom or for an encapsulation. Occasionally a decommissioned oil tank line, old galvanized pipe, or a section of cast iron drain.
Everything from a crawlspace is wet
This is the part that catches homeowners out. Insulation that has been sitting on damp soil for a decade is not the same weight as insulation off the shelf. Wet fiberglass, soaked poly and dirt-caked duct board can run two or three times what you would guess. Twenty contractor bags of crawlspace debris is not a light load. If you are also hauling out spoil, we would rather bring a 10-yard box and swap it than have you overload a 20 and find out at the scale.
What comes out of an older city basement
The City of Roanoke says more than half its housing was built before 1960, and describes its own stock as foursquares, craftsman bungalows and folk Victorians. Those houses have real basements with real storage in them. Fifty or sixty years of one family living in a house produces a basement that takes four days to empty and one large container to hold.
Contents first, structure second
Work the room in that order. Get every loose item out and into the box, then decide what is coming off the walls. Homeowners who tear out paneling on day one end up climbing over debris to reach the storage behind it. Empty the room, sweep it, and then look at it fresh. Half the time the paneling stays.
What cannot ride in the container
Some basement finds do not belong in a roll-off, and this is where Virginia looks different from other states. There is no producer-funded paint take-back program in the Commonwealth, so leftover paint is not something you drop at a retailer here. Household hazardous waste in this valley goes to the Roanoke Valley Resource Authority on an appointment or event basis, not whenever you feel like driving over. Lead-acid batteries are the one genuine statewide disposal ban under the Code of Virginia, and each battery counts as its own violation, so the car battery on the shelf goes to the household hazardous waste point, not into our box.
We also do not take asbestos in any container, ever. In Virginia an asbestos project runs through a contractor licensed by the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation, with notification to the Department of Labor and Industry, and the waste goes to a facility permitted to accept it. If you find wrapped duct insulation, old sheet flooring or nine-inch tile in a basement, stop and get it looked at.
Moisture is why most of this work happens at all
The Roanoke Valley sits on soluble carbonate rock. Virginia Energy, the state geological survey, describes the Valley and Ridge as an extensive karst terrain underlain by limestone and dolomite, with caves, springs and sinkholes. Water in karst moves fast and unpredictably. It does not soak politely down through sand the way it does in a coastal market. It runs along rock, finds a seam, and shows up in your crawlspace after a storm that did nothing to your neighbor two streets over.
Add a humid summer and a mixed four-season climate and you get the conditions that ruin crawlspaces: standing water on the soil, a vapor barrier that was never sealed at the piers or was torn out by a plumber in 1998, foundation vents that let moist summer air in to condense on cool framing, and joists that stay damp longer than they should. Rot follows. So do termites, which are rated severe for this valley in the local design criteria, and which do their worst work exactly where the wood stays wet.
If your crawlspace clean-out turns into sill plate and band joist repair, that is a different kind of debris and a different box. We wrote that up separately in our guide to termite and rot repair debris in Roanoke.
Test for radon before you close anything back up
Radon comes out of the same carbonate rock the sinkholes come from, and it enters a house through its lowest level. In this valley that means the crawlspace and the basement. The Virginia Department of Health notes that 46 counties and 15 cities in the Commonwealth fall in the highest predicted zone and, more usefully, that high radon test results have been found in every Virginia county.
We are a dumpster company and we do not test or mitigate anything. What we will tell you is that the cheapest moment to deal with radon is while the space is open. If you are encapsulating a crawlspace or finishing a basement, run a test before the plastic goes down and the drywall goes up, not after. The Virginia Department of Health runs the state radon program and can point you at test kits.
Picking a size for the box
Here is how these jobs usually land. Full sizing detail is on our dumpster sizes page.
| Job | Box | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Crawlspace only, insulation and old poly | 10 yard | Low volume, high weight, fits a tight drive |
| Crawlspace with dug-out spoil or gravel | 10 yard | Dirt hits the weight limit long before the box looks full |
| Basement contents, one room at a time | 15 yard | Good for a rental turnover or a single finished room |
| Crawlspace and basement together | 20 yard | The Roanoke default, and the one we drop most often |
| Whole-house clear-out, basement to attic | 30 yard | Needs a flat, wide place to sit |
The 20 is the honest default for a valley house with both a crawlspace and a basement. The 10 is the right answer more often than people expect, because dirt and wet insulation are weight, not volume, and because a 10 will fit on a short hillside driveway where a 30 simply will not go.
Where the box goes on a hillside lot
Roanoke sits on a valley floor ringed by Mill Mountain, Read Mountain, Tinker Mountain, the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies. A meaningful share of driveways here are steep, curved, or cut into a hillside. That matters twice. A roll-off comes off the truck on rails under gravity, so a grade changes how it lands and whether the cable can pull it back up loaded. And a loaded container is a concentrated point load on four small contact points, which on karst ground is worth thinking about, since Virginia Energy notes plainly that subsidence is generally not covered by a standard homeowner insurance policy.
We put plywood under the wheels and rails on every residential set, and we walk the drive before we back in. If the drive will not take it, a street placement in the City of Roanoke is possible with a permit from the Transportation Division, and the details of both approaches are in our article on driveway protection during dumpster delivery.
What the City and the County will not take
This is where the valley gets genuinely confusing, and it is the reason people call us. The City of Roanoke is an independent city. It is not part of Roanoke County. Salem is a separate independent city. Vinton is a town inside the county. Four governments, four collection systems, four answers.
- City of Roanoke. The City runs bulk and brush collection with limits, and its solid waste plan explicitly excludes construction, demolition and remodeling debris, along with rocks, dirt, sand, brick and concrete. Homeowner-generated remodeling material is on the excluded list too. Crawlspace spoil is not going out at the curb.
- Roanoke County. The County states that small amounts of debris from homeowner-generated small remodeling or repair work may be set out with bulk pickup, not in the regular cart. That is the opposite answer to the City, four miles away.
- Salem and Vinton. Both run their own collection. Ask them directly rather than assuming the City or County rule applies.
- Everywhere. No paint, no liquids, no lead-acid batteries, no asbestos, no drums that have not been cut and rinsed.
Whatever does go in a container in this valley leaves in an unusual way. The Roanoke Valley Resource Authority hauls the region waste 33 miles by Norfolk Southern rail from the Tinker Creek Transfer Station out to the Smith Gap Landfill. In the city that built the Norfolk and Western, the garbage still goes by train. Current household hazardous waste hours and appointment rules are posted by the Roanoke Valley Resource Authority.
Three dates and one phone call before you start
If the clean-out is going to turn into a renovation, three dates decide what rules apply to you.
- Before 1 January 1978. The federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule applies, administered by the EPA in Virginia. Window replacement and demolition are always covered. Roanoke has no local lead ordinance, so the federal rule is the rule.
- Before 1 January 1985. Under Va. Code § 36-99.7 a local building department may not issue a building permit for renovation or demolition until an asbestos inspection has been certified. The statute says its provisions shall not apply to single-family dwellings or residential housing with four or fewer units, unless the renovation or demolition of such buildings is for commercial or public development purposes. Read that exemption carefully rather than assuming it covers you.
- Before 1960. Not a rule, just the market. More than half of City of Roanoke housing predates it, which is why so many city projects land in the first two categories.
The phone call is Virginia 811, still called Miss Utility by everyone here. Va. Code § 56-265.19 A requires the scheduled work date to be not less than 48 hours nor more than 12 working days after the notice, and a ticket is good for 15 working days. Demolition is expressly covered, not just digging. If you are pulling out a crawlspace pier, trenching for a sump discharge, or taking down an outbuilding, make the call.
When you are ready for a box, call (540) 685-0739. Tell us whether it is a crawlspace, a basement, or both, tell us how the drive sits, and we will bring the right container the first time. We serve the whole valley, and you can check coverage on our service areas page.
Questions this guide did not answer? Call (540) 685-0739. We would rather spend two minutes on the phone than have you order the wrong container.