Every other clearing job starts with an unknown. A storage unit doesn't: you know its exact dimensions before anyone opens it, which means you can put a hard ceiling on the price from the parking lot. Here's what that number bounds, what it can't tell you, and where the estimate still goes wrong.
Quarter truck $325 · half $580 · three-quarters $790 · full $985
Upload Photos & Get Quote →It will not tell you what a facility may do with contents when an account falls behind, what notice is owed to whom, how an auction works, or what any of the timelines are.
Those are questions for your rental agreement, for the facility office, and where money or property is genuinely at stake, for an attorney. They are not questions for a hauling company, and a page that answered them confidently would be guessing at your expense.
We also won't tell you any particular facility's gate hours, elevator availability, cart policy or what they allow on move-out day. Those vary site to site and they change. Every one of them is a two-minute phone call to the office, and the office is the only source that is actually authoritative.
Think about what a normal quote requires. Somebody has to look at a garage, a basement or a whole house and form a judgement about volume from a pile with no edges. An estate is the extreme case — nobody knows what's in the loft until they're in the loft.
A storage unit has edges. It is a rectangle of stated size with a known door height, and nothing in the world can be inside it that is bigger than the box itself. That is a genuine constraint, and it's the only one of its kind in this business.
It doesn't tell you what the job costs. It tells you what the job cannot cost more than — and for most people, most of the time, that turns out to be the reassuring half of the question.
Multiply the floor dimensions by the door height, then divide by 27 to get cubic yards. Our truck holds 16 cubic yards.
| Unit | Cube at 8ft | Absolute ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| 5 × 5 | ≈ 7.4 cu yd | Under half a truck |
| 5 × 10 | ≈ 14.8 cu yd | Under one truck |
| 10 × 10 | ≈ 29.6 cu yd | Under two trucks |
| 10 × 15 | ≈ 44.4 cu yd | Under three trucks |
| 10 × 20 | ≈ 59.3 cu yd | Under four trucks |
Check the height rather than assuming it — eight feet is common but not universal, and drive-up units with roll-up doors often differ from interior ones. The office will tell you.
So a 5×5 packed floor to ceiling with no gaps whatsoever still cannot exceed half a truck. That is worth knowing before you start imagining numbers.
The ceiling is a ceiling because a full cube is physically unusual.
You left yourself an aisle. Almost everyone does, because almost everyone intends to come back for something. That aisle is dead space in the cube and it's often a fifth of the floor.
Boxes don't tessellate. Stacked cartons of mixed sizes leave gaps at every level, and furniture creates voids underneath and behind that nothing filled.
And the top is rarely used. Loading above shoulder height requires effort and a second person, so the last couple of feet under the ceiling usually stayed empty.
In practice, a unit loaded to about shoulder height with an aisle comes in at roughly a third to a half of its cube — which is why the ceiling is useful for ruling things out and useless as an estimate.
Here's the thing that surprises people who've only ever cleared a house.
A unit is denser than the same volume of home. A room you live in has air in it — space to walk, half-empty drawers, furniture with nothing under it. A unit was deliberately loaded to make the cube work, so the same cubic yard holds noticeably more mass.
Books, files, tools, crockery, records and tiles are the usual offenders, and they arrive already boxed, so nobody sees them until the box is lifted. Our pricing is by volume rather than weight, so this doesn't move the number — but it does decide how long the job takes and whether it wants two people.
It's also the reason self-clearing a unit goes badly more often than self-clearing a garage does. The garage lets you carry one thing at a time and stop. A unit is a wall of boxes with a rented van outside.
Two identical 10×10s can be very different jobs, and the contents have nothing to do with it.
Drive-up units are the easy case. The truck backs to the door, the walk is a few feet, and the job runs at the speed people can lift.
Interior corridor units are slower. Everything goes onto a cart, down a hallway, through a door that wants propping, and out to a loading area that may be shared with whoever else is moving that day.
Upper floors depend entirely on the elevator. One freight elevator serving a busy building on a Saturday is a queue, and a queue is the whole difference between a two-hour job and a five-hour one.
None of this changes the price we quote, because the price is the volume. It changes what time we need to arrive and how much of your access window we'll use — so tell us which of the three you have when you send the photographs.
Two minutes on the phone removes almost every way this goes wrong.
There is usually a dumpster on site. It is usually not for this.
Assume you cannot use it until someone in the office says otherwise. The container generally exists for packing waste — flattened cartons, tape, bubble wrap — rather than for absorbing the contents of a unit, and the cost of a misused dumpster lands on the facility, which is why staff notice.
That single fact is what makes a storage clear-out a removal job rather than a tidying job. The contents have to leave the property entirely, which means a vehicle, a plan and somewhere for it all to go. If you were mentally budgeting on the dumpster, the budget was wrong from the start.
The single highest-value thing you can do, and it costs nothing.
Memory about storage contents is reliably wrong. Units get loaded in a hurry during a difficult week — a move that overran, a house that sold, a relative who died — and then the door stays shut for a long time. What people describe on the phone and what is actually behind the door differ more often than they match, and the difference runs in both directions.
So go, lift the door fully, and take pictures. One from the doorway showing the whole face, and one from each back corner if you can get there. Light helps; a phone flashlight is enough.
Send those and the quote is fixed before we arrive. Describe it from memory instead and the number moves on the day, which is nobody's preferred outcome.
A unit bills every month whether or not you think about it. A clear-out bills once.
That asymmetry is the whole decision. Take what you pay monthly, divide the cost of clearing it by that figure, and you have the number of months at which the clear pays for itself. Everything after that month is money you were spending to postpone a decision.
We can't tell you what your unit costs, because rates vary by site, by size and by whatever promotion you signed up under — check your statement rather than trusting the figure in your head, which is frequently the introductory rate rather than the current one.
What we can tell you is that the arithmetic almost always favours clearing sooner, and that the people who run it are usually surprised by how short the payback is. It is not unusual for a clear-out to be worth less than a year of rent on the unit holding the contents.
We'd genuinely rather you didn't pay us to take something a charity would collect for free. But it's worth being honest about the hit rate.
Storage contents skew towards things that were kept because a decision was hard, not because they were valuable. That's the nature of the unit — the easy calls were made before anything went in.
And time in a unit isn't kind. Temperature swings and dry air are hard on upholstery, veneer and particle board, and anything that was already tired went in tired. Solid wood, quality frames and clean, structurally sound pieces do fine and are worth offering.
Our donation guide covers who takes what here, including the refusals, which are the part worth reading first. The free-routes guide covers everything else that can leave without a truck.
A few categories can't just go on the truck with everything else, and they're common in units.
Paint, solvents, fuel, propane cylinders and car batteries need household hazardous waste handling — ask El Paso County what the current arrangements are rather than trusting anything you read online, including this page next year.
Electronics have their own route. Our e-waste guide covers what gets recycled and what doesn't, and old tube televisions in particular are worth reading about before you assume they're a $98 line item.
Anything with a compressor — a small fridge or freezer people forget is in there — prices as an appliance rather than as volume.
Flag these when you send photos and they're handled as part of the same visit rather than becoming a second problem.
Flat rates, quoted before the crew arrives, and we quote whichever of the two models is cheaper without being asked.
| What leaves | Price |
|---|---|
| Minimum job | $75 |
| Moving box | $42 |
| Bag of household waste | $47 |
| Small miscellaneous item | $47 |
| Bookshelf | $97 |
| Sofa | $170 |
| Dresser | $169 |
| Mattress + box spring | $192 |
| Loose pile, small / medium / large | $110 / $174 / $280 |
| Quarter truck (4 cu yd) | $325 |
| Three-eighths truck (6 cu yd) | $455 |
| Half truck (8 cu yd) | $580 |
| Three-quarter truck (12 cu yd) | $790 |
| Full truck (16 cu yd) | $985 |
Storage units are the clearest case in this business for the volume tiers, and it isn't close. Contents are mostly boxed, and boxes itemise terribly — thirty-five of them is $1,470 on its own, and thirty-five boxes is under four cubic yards. Anything more than a handful of cartons and the tier wins by a wide margin.
Loaded to shoulder height with an aisle down the middle. Behind the door:
The ceiling, from the cube, was 29.6 cubic yards — under two trucks, known before the door opened.
The reality: the boxes are about 3.9 cubic yards, the sofa 3.5, the mattress set 2, the dresser 1.5, the bookshelf 1. Call it twelve cubic yards — a three-quarter truck at $790.
Priced piece by piece the same contents come to $2,098, because 35 boxes alone are $1,470. So the tier saves $1,308, and that is the quoted number.
Note how far under the ceiling the real figure landed — 12 against 29.6. That gap is the aisle, the gaps between cartons and the empty two feet under the roof, and it is entirely normal.
The one case that runs the other way, and it's worth knowing.
A 5×5 holding only a sofa and a mattress set is $362 itemised. By volume it's about 5.5 cubic yards, which falls into the three-eighths tier at $455.
So itemising is $93 cheaper, and that's what we'd quote. The rule of thumb: under about five pieces with no boxes, itemise; anything boxed or bulkier than that, tier. You don't have to work out which — send photographs and the quote comes back at the lower of the two.
Ceiling 7.4 cu yd, so half a truck at absolute most. Realistically a quarter truck or an itemised handful. If it's two pieces of furniture, itemising is likely cheaper.
Ceiling 14.8 cu yd, so it cannot exceed one truck. Most come in around a quarter to a half — $325 to $580. The commonest size we clear.
Ceiling 29.6 cu yd. Shoulder-height with an aisle lands around three-quarters of a truck; packed hard to the ceiling can need two. Photograph the back corners, because this is the size where the estimate moves.
Ceilings of 44.4 and 59.3 cu yd. These usually hold a whole household, and they're multi-truck jobs — additional trucks price at the same flat rate, so the arithmetic stays legible.
Go and open it before deciding anything, and don't book the removal on the same visit. Estate contents deserve a slower pass, and there's no advantage to speed here.
Clearing remotely works — photographs from whoever can reach it, instructions from you, and pictures back when it's done. The same arrangement we use for out-of-state cleanouts.
Do the cube arithmetic, then go and open the door — in that order.
The cube gives you a ceiling in ten seconds and stops the number in your head running away. The photographs turn that ceiling into an actual price. Everything else — the weight, the walk, the dumpster you can't use, the monthly bill that keeps running — sits between those two steps, and none of it is a surprise once you've done both.
The one thing that never works is estimating from memory. The door is right there.
Flat price back the same day · quoted at the lower of tier or itemised
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