A typical two-car garage cleared in one visit. We sort as we load, take the shelving with it, set the hazardous material aside for a S.A.F.E. Center, and sweep the slab.
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In Los Angeles the garage is rarely a garage. It is overflow storage for a house with no basement and no attic, which is why a normal one holds thirty years of paint cans, a dead treadmill, four generations of television, someone's college boxes, and a car that has not moved since a different mayor.
That mix is the whole difficulty. A garage load is never one waste stream — it is five or six pretending to be a pile, and at least one of them is illegal to put on a truck.
Five minutes before anything moves. You point at what stays, we flag anything hazardous, anything heavy that will be weighed rather than measured, and anything worth donating. Then we give you the flat number.
Six streams, decided item by item at the tailgate rather than at the landfill gate. Donation, scrap metal, e-waste, green waste, hazardous set-aside, and the genuine remainder.
Shelving, racking, cabinets, workbench, pegboard, the hooks in the joists. Unbolted rather than torn out. You end up with a room, not a room with skeletons on the walls.
Slab swept, screws and glass picked up, doors closed. If you are selling or handing back a rental, this is the state an inspection wants to see.
What comes off the truck before it goes on: paint, stains, thinners and solvents, motor oil and automotive fluids, fuel, pool chemicals, pesticides, aerosols, automotive batteries, propane cylinders, fluorescent tubes and mercury items, sharps and medicines. A general hauler cannot legally transport any of it.
All of it is accepted free, from City of LA and LA County residents, at the seven permanent S.A.F.E. Collection Centers — Hyperion in Playa del Rey, Nicole Bernson in Northridge, Randall Street in Sun Valley, Gaffey Street in San Pedro, Washington Boulevard downtown, LA-Glendale on Colorado Boulevard, and UCLA. Most run Saturday and Sunday 9am–3pm; LA-Glendale is Saturday only and needs a state photo ID at the gate. The hard limit is 125 pounds or 15 gallons per visit, which is a California transportation limit rather than a city rule, so nobody can waive it.
Practically, that means a garage cleanout usually ends with a small box of things going in your car on a Saturday morning rather than on our truck. We would rather tell you that at the quote stage than quietly bury a can of thinner in the middle of a load, which is what the cheaper end of this trade does. Also worth knowing: LASAN runs free monthly drop-off events from 8am to 4:30pm at five sites, including Pendleton Street in Sun Valley, Vanalden Avenue in Northridge and Gaffey Street in San Pedro.
Sources: LASAN S.A.F.E. Centers and LASAN bulky-item pickup.
Our own crews on Los Angeles County jobs. Side yards, narrow walkways and the back of the property is where most of the work actually happens.
Boxes, bins and bags. Old furniture stored "for the next place". Bikes, scooters, sports gear, camping kit, exercise machines. Tools, lumber cutoffs and leftover building material from a job that finished a decade ago — which is construction debris and priced by weight. Second fridges and chest freezers, which are appliances. Tube TVs, towers and printers, which are e-waste and illegal to bin in California. Dead lawnmowers, hoses and bagged soil, which are yard waste. Carpet, curtains, holiday decorations, and whatever is in the rafters that nobody has looked at since it went up.
Tires are worth a specific warning. They are excluded from LASAN's curbside bulky pickup, Burbank caps them at four with a per-item fee, and Long Beach takes a maximum of five at sixteen inches or under. Anyone transporting ten or more waste tires in California has to be a CalRecycle-registered waste tire hauler carrying a trip log. Up to nine is unregulated. If your garage has a stack of twelve, that is a genuine compliance question and worth mentioning on the call.
Detached garages behind bungalows in Mar Vista and Palms, tandem garages under Koreatown apartment buildings, hillside garages with a forty-step approach above Silver Lake and Los Feliz, and three-car garages across Woodland Hills and Tarzana. Whole list on the areas we serve page. If the whole property is being cleared rather than one room, that is an estate cleanout.
Call or text (323) 230-0777, or send photos to team@lajunkhauling.com. Flat number, no obligation, and an honest answer if the city can do it for free.
Paint, solvents and batteries are the reason a garage takes two destinations rather than one. See e-waste disposal for the electronics half of the same rule.
What people ask before they open the door and let someone see it.
A typical two-car garage is a half to three-quarter truck and takes a crew two to four hours, start to finish, including sorting. A garage that has been filling since the 1990s and is stacked to the rafters is a full-day job and sometimes two truck loads. We quote on volume, not hours, so a slow load is our problem.
No. Sorting is most of the value. We separate as we load: donation, scrap metal, e-waste, green waste, hazardous, and genuine landfill. If you want to keep anything, mark it or point at it and it stays. The one thing worth doing beforehand is walking the space once and pulling out anything with sentimental or financial value, because once a shelf comes down it all looks the same.
They come off the load. A general hauler transporting household hazardous waste is breaking California law, so we set them aside, tell you what they are, and point you at the nearest S.A.F.E. Collection Center, where City of LA and LA County residents drop them free. The limit is 125 pounds or 15 gallons per visit, statewide.
Yes. Wall-mounted shelving, wire racking, built-in cabinets and workbenches come out with everything else. Anything bolted to a stud gets unbolted rather than pulled through the drywall.
Standard garage finds. Refrigerant-bearing units are routed for proper recovery and the metal goes to scrap — see appliance removal. Old TVs, monitors and computers behind them are universal waste in California and travel as e-waste.
No. Every free program in LA County is curbside or drop-off. LASAN's bulky-item pickup is free and unlimited but nobody comes inside, up a staircase or into a garage — and it will not take construction material, chemicals or commercial appliances. You can absolutely drag the contents to the curb yourself and book it; a cleanout is what you pay for when you would rather not.
We sweep the slab. You get an empty, swept garage, not an empty garage with a floor full of mouse droppings and screws.
By volume, quoted flat before we start. A quarter truck for a corner, a half truck for a typical two-car garage, a full truck for a lifetime of storage. Heavy material like tile, concrete or roofing found in the back is priced by weight instead. See how our pricing works, and our garage cleanout checklist for how to prep.
Word for word from Google. Nothing tidied.
Hunter is truly dedicated on providing the most excellent of removal of unwanted junk from your home or office. Always on time, very efficient at his job in a timely manner. I would recommend him for any junk removal you may have.
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Local rules, access and drop-off points differ street by street. These pages cover what changes.
Sourced guides to what Los Angeles will take for nothing, who to call and what the rules actually say.
A sorting order that works, the hazardous shelf that has to come out separately, and what the city will take free at the curb.
You already paid the recovery fee at the register. PaintCare sites and the seven S.A.F.E. centers take it back for nothing.
A dumpster on an LA street needs a permit and a hauler permit behind it. Which one is right depends on four things, not on price alone.
Send a photo, get a flat number back. Free, no obligation, no pressure and no call-out fee — and if your city will haul it free instead, we will tell you that too. Most requests are answered within the hour during working hours.
