Cleanouts
Home Cleanout Checklist for Roanoke Valley Houses
Set a date, not a goal. A room-by-room cleanout order for Roanoke Valley houses, plus the opposite answers the City and County give on homeowner remodeling debris.
A home cleanout is a finite job that people turn into an infinite one. The way it becomes infinite is by starting with a goal instead of a date. Set a weekend, get a container on the driveway for that weekend, and work the house in a fixed order. That is the whole method. Everything below is the detail.
This checklist is written for the Roanoke Valley, because the local answers here are genuinely strange. Four governments share one valley and they do not agree about what you can put at the curb. Call (540) 685-0739 if you want help picking a size.
Why this is a container job here
People assume they can stage a cleanout through weekly collection. In this valley that depends entirely on which side of a line your house sits on.
The City of Roanoke is an independent city. It is not part of Roanoke County. Salem is also an independent city. Vinton is a town inside the county. Four collection systems, four sets of limits.
| Question | City of Roanoke | Roanoke County |
|---|---|---|
| Bulk items | Three per week, collected on your trash day | Collected on an alternating two-week schedule |
| Brush | Weekly, limbs under three inches, pile no larger than six feet each way | Collected with bulk on the alternating schedule |
| Homeowner remodeling debris | Not collected. Excluded by the City solid waste plan | Small amounts allowed with bulk pickup, not in the cart |
| Rocks, dirt, brick, concrete | Not collected | Not collected |
| Tires | Two per household per week | Up to four passenger tires, rimless |
| Contractor debris | Not collected | Not collected |
Read that third row again. On homeowner remodeling debris, two adjacent governments four miles apart give opposite answers. If you are gutting a bathroom in Old Southwest, the City will not take it. If you are doing the same bathroom in Cave Spring, the County allows small amounts with bulk collection. Salem runs a third system and Vinton a fourth, so contact them directly rather than assuming. Current details are posted by the City of Roanoke and by Roanoke County.
Even where debris is allowed, the volumes are small and the schedule is slow. A house cleanout produces more in one weekend than any of these programs will take in two months.
There is one more wrinkle worth knowing. The City normally does not collect bagged or boxed trash at all, with a named seasonal exception for biodegradable leaf bags in November and December. So the plan of quietly bagging a cleanout and setting it at the curb over four weeks does not work in the city, and it is slow everywhere else. A container is not an upsell here. It is the only route that matches the volume of an actual cleanout.
The week before
- Pick the weekend. Two full days is the right size for most houses. Three if the garage is involved.
- Book the container for delivery the day before, so you start Saturday morning with an empty box already in place.
- Clear the driveway of vehicles and look straight up at where the box will sit. The hoist arm needs 20 feet or more of clear air, and mature canopy over an older Roanoke driveway is the most common reason a delivery fails.
- Buy contractor bags, a box cutter, painter tape, a marker, and more gloves than you think you need.
- Schedule a donation pickup for the Monday after, or find out the drop-off hours now rather than on the day.
- Put one empty room aside as the staging room. Nothing goes in the box straight from a shelf. It goes to the staging room first.
Work the house in this order
The order is not arbitrary. It runs from the decisions that are easy to the decisions that are hard, and it keeps you from carrying anything twice.
1. Laundry, utility and linen closets
Start here because there are almost no sentimental decisions. Expired cleaning products, worn towels, single socks, broken hangers, dead irons, half-used detergent. Twenty minutes of work and one full bag builds momentum.
2. Bathrooms
Fast and high-yield. Expired medication goes to a pharmacy take-back, not the container and not the drain. Everything else is bagged. If you are replacing a vanity or a tub surround later, do not tear anything out yet.
3. Kitchen and pantry
Slower. Small appliances that have not been used in a year, chipped dishes, plastic storage with no lids, expired pantry stock. If a chest freezer or a second refrigerator is going, unplug and defrost it now so it is dry by loading day. Doors have to come off appliances before disposal.
4. Bedrooms and closets
The highest donation volume in the house. Bag clothing by category, not by room, because that is how a donation center wants it. Mattresses and box springs are ordinary waste in Virginia. There is no mattress take-back program in the Commonwealth, so they either go out as bulk items within the local limit or they go in the box.
5. Living areas and home office
Furniture, books, electronics, paper. Two notes. Books are heavy, so they go low in the container and get spread across the floor of the box rather than piled in one corner. And electronics are not banned from disposal in Virginia. The Computer Recovery and Recycling Act is a manufacturer take-back law, not a landfill ban. Recycling old equipment is still the better choice where a take-back exists, but nobody is going to stop you.
6. Attic
The City of Roanoke says more than half its housing was built before 1960, and the stock includes foursquares, craftsman bungalows and folk Victorians. Those houses have real attics with a lifetime in them. Get help carrying, because those stairs are steep. Watch for loose blown insulation and old wiring.
7. Basement or crawlspace
Crawlspaces are common here, and plenty of older city houses have basements. Both hold damp storage, rusted tools and the household hazardous material you have been avoiding. Damp cardboard is far heavier than dry cardboard, which matters at the scale. What comes out of each space, and how much it weighs, is covered in our guide to crawlspace and basement cleanouts.
8. Garage, shed and yard
Last, because it is mostly disposal decisions. Fuel cans, fertilizer, paint, tires, scrap lumber, storm windows, a mower that has to be drained. Yard debris is worth keeping separate from household waste if there is a lot of it.
What has to leave by another route
Virginia surprises people here. The state solid waste regulation, 9VAC20-81, regulates disposal facilities rather than materials, so there is no long list of banned items the way some states have. What exists is short, and what matters more is that some materials have no local program behind them at all.
- Lead-acid batteries. The one real statewide disposal ban, Va. Code § 10.1-1425.1, with each battery a separate violation.
- Paint, stain, solvents, thinners, pesticides and pool chemicals. Virginia has no producer-funded paint take-back, so there is no store drop-off. These go to household hazardous waste.
- Motor oil, antifreeze, gasoline and propane tanks. Same route. Drain equipment before it goes in the box.
- Asbestos. We never take it in a container. In Virginia asbestos work runs through a contractor licensed by the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation with notification to the Department of Labor and Industry.
- Tires. Virginia runs a waste tire program funded by a per-tire fee. Small numbers go with local bulk collection within the limits above.
Household hazardous waste here runs on appointments
The Roanoke Valley Resource Authority handles household hazardous waste at the Tinker Creek Transfer Station on Hollins Road. A short list including latex paint, aerosol cans, lead-acid car batteries, used antifreeze and used motor oil is accepted during normal operating hours. A broader list is taken at scheduled events that require you to register ahead. It is free. It is not open-ended. Collect the hazardous corner of the garage as you go and make one trip.
Whatever does go in the container leaves the valley by rail. The Resource Authority hauls the region waste 33 miles by Norfolk Southern from Tinker Creek out to the Smith Gap Landfill.
How to load the box
- Heavy and flat on the floor first. Lumber, doors, cabinet carcasses, books.
- Break down anything that can be broken down. A disassembled bookcase takes a quarter of the space.
- Fill corners as you go. Air is the enemy of a single-container cleanout.
- Bag loose material. Loose paper and packing peanuts blow across the neighborhood.
- Nothing above the rim. An overfilled box cannot be tarped, and a load that cannot be tarped cannot legally leave.
- On a sloped driveway, load flat and load low so the weight does not stack at one end.
- Keep 5 feet between the container and combustible walls, openings and eave lines. That is fire code, and it applies to every container of 1.5 cubic yards or more, which means every roll-off on the market.
- Do not put liquids in the box. Karst ground drains fast and unfiltered in this valley, so what leaches out of a container can reach a spring or a well quickly.
- Tarp the box if it is going to sit through rain. Wet material weighs far more than dry, and you pay for weight.
Picking the size
Most home cleanouts land on the 20-yard, which is the Roanoke default. The 15 works for a single room, a small condo or one unit of a rental turnover, and half the city housing stock is rental, so turnovers are common work here. The 30 is for a full house with a loaded attic and a garage. The 10 is the weight box for dirt, brick, concrete and crawlspace spoil, and it is often the only thing that fits on a short hillside driveway.
If you are unsure, our guide to choosing a dumpster size in Roanoke walks through it in more detail, and the footprints are on the dumpster sizes page. When in doubt on a cleanout, go one size up. A second haul costs more than the next size.
Placement, timing and the street
A roll-off needs about 60 feet of straight approach, roughly 10 feet 6 inches of width, and 20 feet or more overhead. We put plywood under the rails and wheels on residential sets. Steep and curved driveways are common in this valley, between Mill Mountain, Read Mountain and the Blue Ridge, and a grade changes both how the box lands and whether we can pull it back up loaded.
If the driveway will not take a box, the street is the fallback and the answer depends on where you live. In the City of Roanoke there is a named Dumpster and Portable Storage Container Permit from the Transportation Division, under City Code §§ 14.1-41 through 14.1-46 and § 30-2. It allows up to 30 consecutive days, requires application at least 10 calendar days ahead, and requires $1 million per occurrence liability naming the City as an additional insured, a 10-foot travel lane, 30 feet of clearance from stop signs and intersections, 5 feet from driveways, and cones and reflective tape at all times. The City does not publish a fee, so ask the Transportation Division. In Roanoke County the residential street is usually maintained by VDOT rather than the county, so a street placement there is a VDOT question. Call the VDOT Salem District before planning one.
If the cleanout is happening because somebody has passed away, work slower and read our estate cleanout checklist first. Different job, different pace.
When you are ready, call (540) 685-0739 and tell us the house, the driveway and the weekend. We will have the box there the day before you start.
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.