Estate cleanout in Golden Valley, AZ

Estate cleanouts in Golden Valley and the rest of Mohave County are Brandon Woodhouse's own work, and he hauls them himself. The job is emptying a house somebody lived in for decades: the furniture, the clothes still on hangers, the boxes stacked in the spare room, the workbench in the carport. Text a photo to (559) 479-1199. That is what sets this apart from hauling off one couch. Nobody is pointing at a single item, the whole house has to go.

The deciding is the slow part of a cleanout like this. Brandon's end of it is the carrying and the hauling, so the family can keep sorting while the truck fills. He works out of a pickup truck with a trailer, and he loads it himself. None of it has to be moved out to the road ahead of time. He carries it out of the back bedroom or the hall closet, wherever it's sitting.

Families usually ask what can actually go on the truck, because an estate turns up things nobody planned for: the chest freezer nobody can lift, half a shed of garden chemicals. The short answer is that most of a household goes and the hazardous end of it stays, and what goes on the truck spells out which is which. Worth reading that before the photos go out. It saves a family from hauling boxes out to the driveway for a load that was never going to take them.

What goes on the truck

• Beds and bed frames
• Couches and recliners
• Dressers and wardrobes
• Dining sets and chairs
• File boxes of paperwork
• Clothes and linens
• Chest freezers
• Carport workbenches

Text a photo of yours to (559) 479-1199.

From the full list of what goes on the truck: estate and hoarding cleanouts.

What's usually in an estate pile

An estate cleanout is a whole household at once, and the pile looks nothing like a weekend garage purge. The furniture goes first: the bed frames, the recliner, the dining set and the hide-a-bed in the spare room. Then come the layers underneath. Decades of paperwork in file boxes. Linens and clothes still on hangers. A chest freezer in the laundry room. Lamps, mirrors, a sewing machine, framed photos already pulled out of the albums. Out in the carport there's usually a workbench and whatever got stacked on it. The people who call are adult children, an executor, sometimes a property manager who inherited the keys along with the listing.

What emptying a house costs

The minimum is $250. Brandon prices off photos, so a few shots from the doorway of each room that needs clearing, plus the garage, get a number back for the whole job. It comes as one number for the house, not a line per room or a charge per item. If a room is too full to show in one shot, send two or three from different corners. Siblings splitting the bill usually want the figure first, and a photo is enough to get it to them. There's more on how the photo turns into a number in the pricing guide for hauling around Golden Valley.

How Brandon empties the house

Brandon loads the truck himself. He works through the rooms the family has cleared to go. He carries from where things sit, so the dresser in the far bedroom and the deep freezer in the laundry room both get walked out. Narrow hallways and a flight of stairs are ordinary on this work, and he works around them. When a property manager or a realtor is holding the keys, Brandon sorts the scheduling with them directly, so nobody in the family has to relay times back and forth. Text a photo to (559) 479-1199.

What stays behind on an estate job

Old houses collect the things Brandon can't haul, and the garage is where they pile up. The paint shelf stays put, and so do the solvents, the thinners and the rest of the household chemicals. Propane tanks are off the truck, and so is any pressurized cylinder, the patio and camping ones included. Brandon leaves the motor oil, the antifreeze and the fuel cans, plus car batteries and anything still holding liquid. Chemicals from a pool or a spa count as household hazardous waste, so they stay with the rest of it. Asbestos needs a licensed abatement contractor, and so does anything that might turn out to contain it. Appliances still hooked to gas, water or power need disconnecting before they move. If the transfer station won't take it, Brandon can't either, so ask and he'll check.

Where the household ends up

What comes out of an estate is often still usable, so donation comes first. A solid dresser or a dining set that just has nowhere to go gets run to a donation center instead of buried. Metal and the other materials that can be handled that way get recycled where they can be. What's genuinely trash, like the stained mattress and the water-damaged boxes from the carport, goes to the landfill. People want to hear where the rest of it went, and that is the order it goes in. A hoard runs differently, and cleanouts in a house packed wall to wall are their own job.

Cleanouts across Mohave County

Brandon is based in Golden Valley and works the whole Mohave County, so a house on the Kingman side and one down in Fort Mohave are the same job to him. Bullhead City, Lake Havasu City, Mohave Valley, Dolan Springs and Laughlin in Nevada get the truck as well, along with Valle Vista, Chloride, Oatman, Yucca and White Hills. On estate work that spread matters, because the house being cleared is often not in the town the family lives in, and somebody still has to be there to open the door. Scheduling lands inside his hours, which run 7 to 5 Monday through Saturday, with nothing on Sunday. The whole list of towns he hauls in sits on one page.

How the price works

Text a photo of what needs to go to (559) 479-1199. Brandon texts back one number for the whole job. No hourly rate. Jobs start at $250. More on how pricing works.

Where Brandon does this

All of Mohave County. See every town Brandon covers for estate cleanout.