Garage Cleanout Los Angeles

What garage cleanouts look like on the Westside

The classic call is a two-car garage that has not held a car in a decade. Mar Vista's 1950s ranch houses north of Venice Boulevard, Westchester's Kentwood tracts, Rancho Park, Walteria and West Torrance all have them: a treadmill under a tarp, the boxes from the move before last, the previous owner's leftover tile, a water heater that was replaced in 2019 and never left. Three things set the pile in motion. The house gets listed and the agent wants the garage empty for photos. An ADU is going up on the garage footprint, which is common in Mar Vista and 90025, and the contractor needs it bare by a date. Or a new car needs to sleep indoors before the rains.

The other version is small and awkward. Venice bungalows with a single-car garage off the alley, Ocean Park alley garages in Santa Monica, shared garages under Hermosa Beach fourplexes, and tandem spots in Palms that have become a second closet. Add the storage units along Lincoln and Sepulveda that have been paid monthly since a 2021 move, and the sheds behind Topanga cabins and Palos Verdes horse properties. Same job in miniature: everything out, decide what is worth keeping, the rest gone in one trip.

How a garage cleanout works

Text (310) 905-5138 wide shots of each wall and the floor, plus one photo of the driveway or alley the garage opens onto. Miles quotes the whole garage by the truck space it will fill, with the loading, sorting, sweeping and disposal routing already in the number. If you want to keep a corner, say so in the text or mark it with painter's tape before we arrive. Plenty of customers give us a one-line rule, like everything goes except the bikes and the Christmas bins, and that works fine.

Two people handle a single-car garage; a packed double garage gets three. We work from the door inward and sort as we go into four piles on the driveway: donate, scrap metal, e-waste, and dry trash. Shelving gets unbolted from the studs and goes on the truck. Anything that looks like paperwork, photos, keys or jewelry gets set on a table for you to look through before it leaves. Sealed containers of unknown liquid stay put, and we tell you where to take them. A single-car garage usually takes about an hour; a two-car garage packed to the door runs two to three hours including the sweep. We bring the broom and a shop vacuum, and you get the floor back, not just a smaller pile.

We do not demolish anything. Built-in cabinets, workbenches bolted to the slab and the garage itself stay unless you have had them taken apart already, in which case the pieces ride with the scrap wood.

Load sizes for garage cleanouts

Garage loads weigh more than they look. Boxes of tile, a stack of concrete pavers, engine parts and bags of old grout add up fast, so if the photos show heavy material we price that part by weight and say so in the quote. Loose camping gear and holiday decorations take space but not weight and price the normal way.

Where it goes

More of a garage is usable than people expect. Metal shelving, bike frames with no wheels, grills, the retired water heater and anything else mostly steel or aluminum go to a scrap-metal recycler rather than the landfill.

Old monitors, printers, a VCR and the drawer of dead phones ride separately to an e-waste recycler; see our e-waste removal page for how that works. Dry, empty paint cans are ordinary trash and come with us. Wet paint, motor oil, antifreeze, pesticides and pool chemicals do not go on our truck under any circumstances. If you live in the City of Los Angeles, the West LA S.A.F.E. Center at UCLA on Charles E. Young Drive and the Hyperion S.A.F.E. Center on Imperial Highway in Playa del Rey take household hazardous waste from residents at no charge, and California's PaintCare program lists paint-store drop-off sites for leftover paint. We will leave those items grouped by the door with a list.

What is left, which is usually broken particleboard, mildewed cardboard and the mystery pile, goes to a licensed transfer station: Southern California Disposal on Frank Street in Santa Monica for Westside loads, the Culver City station on Jefferson Boulevard for Culver City, Palms and Beverlywood, and the Gardena transfer station on West Rosecrans Avenue for the beach cities and Torrance. Scrap lumber and leftover tile go in as mixed construction debris at the same stations.

Access situations we plan for

• Alley garages: Ocean Park, Venice and the flats of Beverly Hills open onto alleys. We back the truck to the door, keep one lane open for neighbors and finish the alley portion first so nobody is boxed in for long.
• Tandem and subterranean parking: Palms and Westwood apartment garages have low clearance, so the truck stays at the street and the crew runs dollies up the ramp. Tell us the clearance height if you know it.
• Storage facilities: we book around the facility's gate hours, use their carts and freight elevator, and need the gate code and unit number texted the morning of. Most facilities want the unit swept and the lock removed before the account closes; we do both.
• Hillside garages: Topanga, Beverly Crest and the Hollywood Riviera have driveways the truck cannot turn around in. We stage at the street and carry, and the carry is already in the number.
• HOA rules: Playa Vista, North Redondo townhome complexes and Beverlywood do not allow piles at the curb, so everything goes straight from the garage to the truck with no staging on the street.
• Walk streets: in Hermosa and Manhattan Beach the garage usually faces the alley even when the front door faces a walk street, which makes the garage the easy part of the house.

When the city program covers it, and when it doesn't

If your garage is in the City of Los Angeles, which covers Venice, Mar Vista, Palms, West LA, Westchester, Playa del Rey, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades and Bel Air, LA Sanitation will collect bulky items from the curb for free. Schedule through 311 or MyLA311 at least one business day ahead and put the items out on your regular trash day. For the three or four large things in a garage, the old refrigerator, a metal shelving unit, a treadmill, that is the right move and we will tell you so.

Where it stops is the rest of the garage. LASAN takes bulky items, not boxes of loose contents, construction material, tile, paint or anything hazardous, and the carrying from the back of the garage to the curb is yours. Incorporated cities are tighter. Santa Monica crews do not enter private property, so the contents have to be moved out to the alley first, and the cap is five items per pickup, three pickups a year. Culver City gives single-family homes two free pickups a year and apartments one, six items each, at the curb by 6 a.m. Torrance's Large Item Pick Up is one free call per address per calendar year for up to 20 items, and it excludes construction debris, hazardous waste, e-waste and anything two people cannot lift; the city also publishes a self-haul discount at its contracted station. Manhattan Beach offers up to six pickups a year through its hauler, with third-party sites reporting a three-item, 150-pound limit per visit. A garage is mostly small things in quantity, which is the one shape none of these programs is built for.

When garages get cleared

Garage calls cluster three times a year. January, after the holiday bins come down and the resolution to park inside is still fresh. March through May, when Westside listings go live and agents want the garage empty before the photographer comes. And October into November, when people on the Westside and in the South Bay get stored boxes off the floor and the car under a roof ahead of the winter rains. ADU work runs year-round and sets its own date; if your contractor has a demo day, text us the week before and we will clear it the day prior so the crew walks into a bare slab.