Dumpster Rental in Old Southwest, VA

Roll-off containers for Old Southwest homes and jobsites

Old Southwest is the hardest and the most interesting neighborhood we work in. It is a pre-1920s grid immediately south-west of downtown Roanoke, laid out with streets of roughly twenty to thirty feet, lots averaging around five thousand square feet, and rear alleys behind most of the blocks. The houses are vernacular frame with deep front porches, and the streets are named the way old Roanoke named things: Day Avenue, Mountain Avenue, Highland Avenue, Woods Avenue. It is a City of Roanoke neighborhood, which is worth stating plainly because Virginia’s structure trips people up. The City of Roanoke is an independent city and is not part of Roanoke County. The county line is a jurisdictional line here, not a formality, and it decides who issues your permit and who maintains the pavement.

What makes Old Southwest different from every other page on this site is that three separate constraints stack on the same block. The first is the street geometry. Twenty-foot pavement with cars parked both sides does not leave room for a roll-off and a travel lane, which is why the alley behind the house is very often the right answer. The City’s container permit expressly covers alleys, and it requires a ten-foot travel lane to stay open the whole time. The second is age. This is pre-1978 housing almost without exception, which puts renovation under the federal EPA Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, EPA-administered in Virginia, with window replacement and demolition covered every time. The third is design review. Old Southwest sits in the City’s H-2 Historic Neighborhood Overlay District, and the seven-member Architectural Review Board reviews new construction, alterations and demolition of structures inside the historic districts. A Certificate of Appropriateness is required when proposed work changes the design of an architectural feature. Whether a container itself touches that process is not something the ARB publishes, so we will not pretend to know. Call the City’s historic preservation staff before you plan a demolition here, and call us about the box.

The debris profile follows from the age. Plaster over wood lath rather than drywall. Original wood sash. Slate and multiple layers of asphalt on some roofs. Full basements under a good share of these houses, alongside the crawlspaces that are common everywhere in the valley. Termite infestation probability is rated SEVERE for the City of Roanoke, and the porches on these houses are exactly where you find it: rotten sill plate, rotten band joist, rotten porch framing. That is a small container of very heavy material, which is why we push people toward a 10 or a 15 rather than the 30 they picture. The other half of the Old Southwest job is volume rather than weight: full attics, deep basements and a hundred years of accumulation in houses that have often changed hands only a few times. An estate clearance on Mountain Avenue is a different container from a bathroom gut on the same street, and we would rather bring two boxes on two days than one that cannot be moved.

Access is the thing to sort out first, and the sooner you call the better. We would rather look at the alley on a Tuesday than discover on a Friday morning that the box will not turn in. Roanoke averages 42.82 inches of precipitation a year and 14.8 inches of snow, per the 1991 to 2020 normals for the airport station published by NWS Blacksburg, so weather rarely stops a delivery here. Geometry does. Call (540) 685-0739, describe the alley, and we will tell you honestly whether we can get in.

What we know about working in Old Southwest

Everything about a job in Old Southwest starts with the fact that this is the City of Roanoke and not Roanoke County. City rules apply. A container in the street, the alley or on the sidewalk requires the City of Roanoke Dumpster and Portable Storage Container Permit from the Transportation Division of Public Works, authorized by City Code sections 14.1-41 through 14.1-46 and section 30-2. The conditions were plainly written with streets like these in mind. A 10-foot travel lane must stay open at all times. The container must sit at least 30 feet from stop signs, stop bars, crosswalks and intersections, and at least 5 feet from any driveway. It may not block a walkway or a fire hydrant. Traffic cones and reflective tape stay in place at all times, our contact information appears on at least two sides, and the applicant notifies the adjacent businesses and residences before the box lands. The application goes in at least 10 calendar days ahead with a certificate of public liability insurance of not less than one million dollars per occurrence naming the City of Roanoke as an additional insured. A dumpster may stay 30 consecutive days; a PODS-type portable storage container gets 7. The City does not publish the fee, so contact the Transportation Division. On top of that, Old Southwest lies in the H-2 Historic Neighborhood Overlay District, where the Architectural Review Board reviews alterations and demolition and a Certificate of Appropriateness is required when the work changes the design of an architectural feature. Sort that out before the first prybar, not after. Two more Virginia specifics catch people on these blocks. Va. Code section 36-99.7 bars a locality from issuing a building permit for renovation or demolition of a building whose initial building permit predates 1 January 1985 without a licensed asbestos inspection — and residential buildings of four units or fewer are exempt unless the work is for commercial or public development. Read that exemption as written; it is narrower than people assume. Separately, the Department of Labor and Industry must be notified 10 working days before any demolition, asbestos or not. We do not accept asbestos in our containers. In Virginia an asbestos project runs through a DPOR-licensed contractor with DOLI notification, and the waste goes to a facility permitted to take it under 9VAC20-81. Frost depth in the City of Roanoke is 18 inches. For the permit sequence in plain order, read our guide to dumpster permits in Roanoke.

• Regionthe City of Roanoke
• Distance from our yard4 miles south-east of our Peters Creek Road yard
• Main routesPeters Creek Road south to Shenandoah Avenue, then east past downtown to Franklin Road
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

We usually come down Peters Creek Road to Shenandoah Avenue and across the north side of downtown, then south on Franklin Road into the neighborhood. When traffic on the surface streets is bad we take I-581 to the Elm Avenue exit instead and work west. Jefferson Street south from the City Market covers the eastern blocks, and Brandon Avenue brings us in from the Grandin side for anything up above Highland Park. The route is never the problem in Old Southwest. The last hundred feet is. Twenty to thirty foot streets with cars on both sides, mature trees over the pavement and rear alleys with real utility clutter mean we want more detail here than anywhere else on this site. Tell us the block, whether the alley runs behind you, how wide the alley entrance is, whether there is a garage or a fence limiting the swing, and what the wires look like. If a driveway placement is possible we will take it every time. If not, we will plan a street or alley placement and file the City permit ten days out.

Routes we run: Peters Creek Road south to Shenandoah Avenue, then east past downtown to Franklin Road, I-581 south to the Elm Avenue exit and west into the top of the neighborhood, Franklin Road south from Elm Avenue for the Day Avenue and Mountain Avenue blocks, Jefferson Street south from the City Market for the eastern edge, Brandon Avenue east from the Grandin side for anything above Highland Park.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Old Southwest

Start with the question nobody has to ask in a normal county: which government are you standing in. The Roanoke Valley runs four of them at once. The City of Roanoke is an independent city and is not part of Roanoke County. Salem is a second independent city. Vinton is a town, and the town is in the county. Roanoke County keeps its own courthouse at 305 E. Main St in Salem, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the lines here were drawn. Virginia is also a Dillon Rule state, so a locality holds “only those powers which are expressly granted” — no office in this valley can invent a container rule the General Assembly never enabled, and none of the four has to answer the same way its neighbor does. Work out which one covers the address in Old Southwest before you plan anything in the street, because the street is where the answers split. In the City of Roanoke the pavement is the City’s, and a container in it needs the City of Roanoke Dumpster/Portable Storage Container Permit, issued by the Transportation Division of Public Works under City Code §§ 14.1-41 through 14.1-46 and § 30-2. The numbers are worth carrying in your head: 30 consecutive days maximum for a dumpster, 7 days for a portable storage container, the application in at least 10 calendar days ahead of placement, and a certificate of public liability insurance of at least $1 million per occurrence naming the City of Roanoke as an additional insured. Placement is 30 feet clear of stop signs, stop bars, crosswalks and intersections, 5 feet clear of driveways, never blocking a walkway or a fire hydrant, with a 10-foot travel lane kept open and “traffic cones and reflective tape in place at all times.” Company contact information goes on at least two sides, and the applicant notifies the adjacent businesses and residences. The City does not publish the fee, so ask the Transportation Division for the current amount rather than trusting a number off a web page, ours included. In Roanoke County the pavement out front is usually not the county’s at all. Under the Byrd Road Act of February 1932, VDOT maintains the secondary roads — only Arlington and Henrico opted out, and only five states run their roads this way — so a street placement out there is a VDOT question, and the call goes to the VDOT Salem District before you plan it. We will not tell you there is a VDOT dumpster permit, because 24VAC30-151-30 does not list one. What the regulation does say, at 24VAC30-151-50, is that objects placed in the right-of-way in violation of the rules must be removed within 10 calendar days of receipt of notice from VDOT, and immediately, at the owner’s expense, if they are an immediate safety risk. Salem runs its own arrangements and Vinton runs a fourth; call the town or the city directly. On your own driveway, none of that applies, which is why the driveway is nearly always the right answer in Old Southwest. The driveway carries one rule of its own and it is a fire rule. Virginia is on the Statewide Fire Prevention Code at 13VAC5-51, which adopts the 2021 International Fire Code, and § 304.3.3 sets the trigger at 1.5 cubic yards and the clearance at five feet from combustible walls, openings and combustible roof eave lines. Every roll-off we own is over that threshold, so five feet is simply how we set them: off the siding, off the soffit line, clear of doors, windows, exits, fire apparatus access and hydrants, and no flammable or combustible liquids in the box. There is no state fire permit for an individual container. Last, the approach. To swing a box off the rails we want about 60 feet of straight, roughly 10.5 feet of width and 20-plus feet of clear overhead. What fails that test in Old Southwest is almost never the ground. It is the mature tree canopy with the electrical service drop running underneath it — a spot that looks wide open at eye level can be closed at twenty feet. Walk out and look up before you call, and tell us what you see.

Two more layers reach every job we run, and both come from Richmond rather than from a local counter. The first is what may legally go in the box. Virginia’s solid waste regulation is 9VAC20-81, administered by Virginia DEQ, and it regulates facilities rather than materials — there is no long banned-items list here to memorize, whatever other dumpster pages tell you. The one real statewide disposal ban is lead-acid batteries, Va. Code § 10.1-1425.1, where each battery is a separate violation. Waste tires run on a threshold rule rather than a flat ban. Beyond that, be careful what you read on other dumpster pages: there is no electronics disposal ban in Virginia, and the Computer Recovery and Recycling Act is a manufacturer take-back law rather than a landfill prohibition. Leftover paint has no producer-funded drop-off program in this state either, so it has to be dealt with the hard way. None of that makes everything welcome in our containers. Paint, solvents, fuel, automotive fluids, batteries and pool chemicals stay out and take the household hazardous waste route instead. Asbestos is the hard stop. We do not accept asbestos in our containers. In Virginia an asbestos project runs through a DPOR-licensed contractor with DOLI notification, and the waste goes to a facility permitted to take it under 9VAC20-81. Three agencies: licensing at DPOR, notification and permits at DOLI, disposal at DEQ. Two dates decide whether that lands on your job before a building permit is even issued. Under Va. Code § 36-99.7 a locality may not issue a building permit for renovation or demolition of a building whose initial building permit predates 1 January 1985 without a licensed asbestos inspection, and the exemption is narrow and specific: residential buildings of four units or fewer are exempt unless the work is for commercial or public development. Read that twice before assuming a house is out of it. Separately, DOLI must be notified 10 working days before ANY demolition, asbestos or not. The second date is 1 January 1978, which puts a project under the federal EPA RRP rule for lead-safe work practices; in Virginia the RRP rule is EPA-administered rather than state-run, and window replacement and demolition are covered regardless of square footage. Roanoke has no local lead ordinance, so the federal rule is the whole of it. Then, before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled — and before anything is knocked down, because demolition is expressly covered — call Virginia 811 on 811. Most people here still call it Miss Utility. Va. Code § 56-265.19 A sets the window at “not less than 48 hours nor more than 12 working days,” so that call goes in the week before, not the morning of. Our permit and placement guide walks the whole sequence, and the solid waste chapter, the right-of-way permit and the collection limits are all published by the City of Roanoke and by Roanoke County.

The ground under Old Southwest decides most of the rest. Frost depth in this valley is published as two numbers, not one: 18 inches in the City of Roanoke, and 24 inches in Roanoke County, Vinton and Salem. Which one governs a footing depends on which locality the address sits in, which is why we name the locality every time we print the number. All four are rated SEVERE for termite infestation probability, and that rating, plus a crawlspace-heavy housing stock and humid summers, produces the signature job in this market: sill plate, band joist and subfloor replacement. Crawlspaces are common here, and plenty of older city houses have basements, so a cleanout can start below grade in either direction. Termite and rot debris is short, wet and heavy, and it is the commonest reason a container goes over payload while it still looks half full — on that work we would rather send a 10 yard twice than a 30 yard once. The rock underneath is soluble carbonate: this is Virginia’s karst belt, with caves, springs and sinkholes, and Virginia Energy puts the consequence plainly, warning that subsidence “is generally not covered by a standard homeowner’s insurance policy.” A loaded box is a concentrated point load on soil that may be bridging a void. That is a real reason to care where it goes, not a line of sales copy. The other terrain problem is slope. Between Mill Mountain, Read Mountain, Tinker Mountain, the Blue Ridge and the Allegheny ridges, a fair share of the driveways we back down are steep, curved or cut into a hillside. That changes whether a box will stay where it is set, whether the truck can get it off the rails at all, and whether the cable can pull it back up loaded. Load flat, load low. Plywood goes under every wheel and under both rails, on every placement, all year. The weather is the part outsiders get backwards in both directions. The 1991–2020 normals for station ROA, published by the National Weather Service office in Blacksburg, are 14.8 inches of snow, 42.82 inches of precipitation and a mean annual temperature of 58.1°F. It does snow here. It just does not snow enough to plan a season around: enough to shut a jobsite for a couple of days a winter, and the code agrees, with a ground snow load of 30 psf and ice barrier underlayment not required. Elevation changes that inside our service area, and the design figures from the higher ground west of the valley are not this valley’s figures. The real seasonal drivers are the remnants of tropical systems climbing the Blue Ridge, ice storms and freeze–thaw. And water. In November 1985 the Roanoke River crested at 23.35 feet against a 10-foot flood stage on 6.61 inches of rain in 24 hours, at least ten people in the valley died, and the answer was the USACE Roanoke River Flood Reduction Project. Anybody who was here remembers it, and it is why a soaked crawlspace or a flooded basement is an ordinary call for us rather than an unusual one. Where the load ends up is the local detail we like best. The Roanoke Valley Resource Authority takes the valley’s waste to the Tinker Creek Transfer Station and then moves it 33 miles by Norfolk Southern rail to the Smith Gap Landfill. In the city that built the Norfolk and Western, the garbage still goes by train. Household hazardous waste is appointment and event based through the RVRA rather than curbside, so plan around a date instead of setting it out. And the collection answers split the way everything else here splits: the City of Roanoke, under City Code Chapter 14.1, runs bulk and brush collection with limits and explicitly does not collect construction and demolition debris, while Roanoke County will take small amounts of homeowner remodeling debris with bulk collection. Salem runs a third system and Vinton a fourth. Four governments, four answers, and the line where a roll-off starts sits in a different place in each of them.

Sizes we deliver to Old Southwest