Moving-out cleanouts in San Antonio: what they cost and when to book

The short answer

A move-out cleanout in San Antonio prices by volume: 1/4 truck $241, 3/8 $338, 1/2 $431, 5/8 $513, 3/4 $587, 7/8 $661, full truck $732.

Most house moves generate between a quarter and a half truck of genuine discard, before you count the garage. Count the garage and it is often a full load.

Labor and disposal are included. There is no stair charge, no long-carry fee and no same-day surcharge, and the minimum for a visit is $75.

Do it before the movers, not after

This is the single biggest saving available and most people get it backwards.

Long-distance moving is priced on weight or on volume. Every box of stuff you are not going to unpack, every piece of garage furniture you secretly know is going straight into the next garage, is something you are paying twice for: once to move it and once to eventually get rid of it.

The sequence that works: sort, discard, then let the movers quote. A half-truck load at $431 taken out beforehand can come off the moving estimate by considerably more than that, and you do not spend the first month in the new house tripping over it.

What the movers will refuse anyway

Even if you wanted to take it, a lot of it will not go on the truck. Movers routinely decline propane cylinders, paint, solvents, pool chemicals, pesticides, automotive fluids and car batteries.

That is the garage shelf in almost every San Antonio house, and it is household hazardous waste. It goes to a dedicated drop-off rather than on a general junk load, so check the current accepted list and hours on your city's solid waste page and deal with it as its own task.

They will also usually decline anything wet, anything with pests, and open food. The pantry sweep is its own bag pile.

Where San Antonio moves generate volume

The metro's classic move is out of an older house inside Loop 410 and into a newer build out past 1604, or the other way around. Both directions produce the same three problems.

The garage. An attached two-car garage that has been storage for twenty years, because it is too hot in this city to use it for anything else.

The shed. Almost every yard on the South, East and Northeast sides has one, and nobody has opened it since the last move.

The attic over the garage. No basements here, so that hatch is where the holiday decorations, the school boxes and the spare mattress went.

Also: furniture that fit the old house and does not fit the new one. A formal dining set out of a 1950s house does not go into an open-plan new build in Alamo Ranch, and a big sectional does not go into a 1940s bungalow in Beacon Hill.

Item prices for the obvious discards

Worked examples

The furniture that will not fit: dining table 6-8 seat $163 + six dining chairs at $45 each ($270) = $433. A half truck is $431, so the load price wins by $2.

The den: entertainment center $96 + bookshelf $72 + large area rug $68 = $236, against a $241 quarter truck. Items win by $5.

The garage on its own: $431 for half a truck, or $732 if it is packed to the door.

Whole house discard before listing: usually 3/4 at $587 or a full truck at $732.

If you are selling, clear before the photos

Timing matters more than most sellers think. Listing photos get taken once, and a garage stacked to the rafters is the difference between a buyer reading your house as three bedrooms with storage and reading it as three bedrooms with a problem.

Buyers in this market open the garage door. They always open the garage door. A two-car garage you can see across is one of the cheapest presentation upgrades available on a San Antonio listing, and a full truck at $732 is small money against that.

Same for the backyard. A dead patio set and a rusted grill on a slab patio photograph badly, and both are cheap to remove: patio table $89, patio chairs $30 each, charcoal grill $59, propane grill $71.

The closing-day squeeze

The version of this job that goes wrong is always the same. Closing is Friday, the movers came Wednesday, and there is a garage of leftovers and a dead fridge standing between you and a clean handover.

Two things prevent it. Book the cleanout for the day after the movers rather than the day of, so there is no truck conflict in a single-width driveway. And get the price agreed in advance so nothing has to be negotiated on a day when you have a title appointment.

In summer, take the earliest slot available. Loading a garage on a San Antonio afternoon in July is the slowest possible version of the job.

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