Somewhere under the bikes nobody rides, the treadmill that became a coat rack, and fifteen years of "I'll deal with it Saturday" is a two-car garage that could hold two cars. Our crew clears it straight into the truck — nothing staged on the driveway for the HOA to photograph — and sweeps the slab before they leave. A single bay runs $295, a typical two-car garage about $525, a packed one $895.
Photos of the garage — flat price back in seconds
Upload Photos & Get Quote →The Cary garage fills in a predictable way: sports gear the kids aged out of, the old fridge that became the backup fridge, shelving that holds boxes that hold older boxes. We work it in zones — keep, donate, haul — with you pointing and the crew carrying. Usable gear rides to the Habitat Wake ReStore and Triangle donation partners; scrap metal gets recycled; the genuinely done stuff is disposed of properly. The one thing we legally can't truck is wet paint and chemicals — we consolidate those for Wake County's household-hazardous-waste drop-off and take literally everything else, then sweep. Most two-car garages are a two-to-three-hour job.
There's a structural reason garages here get this full. North Carolina houses don't have basements. Cary is built on slab and crawl space, so the storage a Midwest family would put underground goes into the garage, the attic over it, and the crawl space beneath the house. In the town's mature 1980s and 1990s subdivisions — the ones with real two-car garages and twenty-plus years of the same family in them — that's two decades of overflow with nowhere else to go. Cary is past 180,000 residents now, a lot of them tech families who moved in for the schools and the RTP commute and never left, which is exactly the tenure that produces a garage you can't park in.
Two or three photos from the driveway with the door up, plus one of the attic hatch or the back corner if that's where the real volume is. That's the whole estimate.
The number comes back in seconds and it doesn't move. Same-day is usually open across Cary, Apex, Morrisville and Holly Springs.
You stand at the door and say keep or go. Donations get separated as we load, hazardous cans get staged for the county drop-off, and the slab gets swept.
Garages price by how much of the truck they fill, because that's what a garage actually is — volume. Here's the full ladder rather than three rounded tiers, so you can find your garage on it.
| Truck-fill | Price | What that looks like in a Cary garage |
|---|---|---|
| 1/4 truck | $295 | One bay's worth — the wall of boxes and a couple of big items |
| 3/8 truck | $415 | A bay plus the shelving units that held it |
| 1/2 truck | $525 | The typical two-car clear — you can park again |
| 5/8 truck | $625 | Two-car plus the attic space above it |
| 3/4 truck | $720 | Packed two-car with furniture and appliances in the mix |
| 7/8 truck | $810 | Garage plus a crawl-space pull or a shed |
| Full truck | $895 | Twenty years, floor to rafters, nothing kept |
Just the one heavy thing? Then it's flat, not volume: treadmill $155, elliptical $131, stationary bike $97, home gym $192, weight bench $93, weight set $99, garage or backup fridge $221, chest freezer $196, mini fridge $155, lawn mower $88, propane grill $95, metal shelving $95, storage cabinet $99, set of tires $117, small safe $135, trampoline $156, swing set $192. Loose piles price at $110 small / $174 medium / $280 large. $75 minimum. Carrying, sorting, hauling, disposal and the final sweep are all in the number, and there's no NC sales tax on the service.
Third-party context for what a truck-fill costs in the Triangle: Junk Doctors publishes a $135 minimum, quarter truck $298, half $488, three-quarter $608, full $738 (junkdrs.com/pricing). McJunk publishes a $175 minimum, quarter $305, half $435, three-quarter $565, full $695 — plus a $10–$50 trip charge, a $40 mattress surcharge, $10 per tire and $10 per CRT television, which matters when a garage cleanout produces exactly those items. Those are on-site volume estimates; ours is quoted from photos before we leave.
| Option | Cost | Speed | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Town of Cary curbside collection | Per the Town's current schedule (check townofcary.org) | Scheduled collection day | Curbside and scheduled — you haul everything to the street yourself and it sits visibly at the end of the driveway until the truck comes, which is the part your HOA has an opinion about |
| Donate it (Habitat Wake ReStore / Goodwill) | Free | Days | Only clean, sellable tools, furniture and materials — and the useless 80% of a garage still has to go somewhere |
| Self-haul to South Wake Landfill | ~$37/ton tip fee, plus a truck if you don't own one | Two or three round trips, a full Saturday | Loading, tarping, weighing, unloading — twice — and appliances and electronics can't go in the load at all under NC's landfill bans |
| Traditional truck-fill hauler | $135–$175 minimum, $695–$738 full truck (published Junk Doctors / McJunk rates) | 1–3 days | Volume estimated in your driveway, with trip, tire and TV surcharges layered on a garage load |
| JunkRabbit | $295–$895 truck-fill, or flat for a single heavy item | Same day, most days | None — photo-quoted first, loaded at the garage door, donation-routed, swept |
Competitor, municipal and landfill figures above are third-party published rates, not ours. Our numbers are the truck-fill and flat item prices in the table further up this page.
First, the thing people get wrong: Cary is not on the City of Raleigh's $35 Bulky Load program. That's Raleigh's municipal service for Raleigh addresses, run by City of Raleigh Solid Waste Services, and the town line is a hard boundary — quoting Raleigh's price to a Cary address is one of the more common bits of bad advice on local forums. The Town of Cary runs its own scheduled curbside collection, with its own accepted-items list, limits and calendar, and we're not going to speak for it: check townofcary.org for what's currently taken and when, because municipal rules change.
What we can say is what every curbside program has in common, and why it's a poor fit for a garage in this town. It collects from the street. Everything you want gone — the shelving, the twelve boxes, the dead treadmill, the backup fridge — has to be carried out of the bay, down the driveway, and stacked at the curb by you, then left there until the town's truck arrives on its day, not yours. That's the entire labor of a garage cleanout, done by you, for the privilege of waiting.
And then there's the part that makes it genuinely risky here: Cary's HOAs are strict about visible curbside bulk. The covenants in Preston, Lochmere, Amberly, Highcroft and the rest of the town's planned communities exist specifically to keep a pile of household goods from sitting at the end of a driveway for three days, and enforcement letters go out for far less. A garage cleanout staged at the curb is the single most photogenic covenant violation there is.
Which is the whole value of what we do, in one sentence: the truck loads at the garage door. Nothing crosses the driveway apron, nothing waits at the street, nothing gets photographed by a neighbor with the board's email address. You go from a garage you can't park in to a swept slab, in an afternoon, with no evidence it ever happened.
What we can't put on the truck: wet paint, solvents, pesticides, pool chemicals, propane tanks and other household hazardous waste. Those go to Wake County's HHW facility — we'll consolidate and stage them so the drop-off is a ten-minute errand instead of an afternoon.
A garage is the best-sorting job we do, because so much of it is still good. Tools, hardware, lumber offcuts, doors, light fixtures and solid furniture go to Habitat for Humanity ReStore — ten stores across the Triangle, and they take exactly the building-adjacent material that fills a suburban garage. Household goods, sports equipment and kids' gear go to Goodwill of Eastern North Carolina. Ask when you book and we'll get you a donation receipt.
Then the material that legally can't be dumped: North Carolina bans appliances and white goods, televisions and computers, whole tires and used oil from landfills. The backup fridge goes to appliance recycling with its refrigerant recovered, the old TV in the corner goes to e-waste, the tire stack goes to a tire processor, and loose metal — shelving frames, bed rails, the mower deck — gets pulled for scrap. Only the true remainder goes to disposal, at roughly $37 a ton at South Wake Landfill. Cheap, close disposal is a real reason a two-car garage prices at $525 here instead of what it would cost in a coastal metro.
The HOA is the constraint that shapes the whole job. Cary's planned communities regulate what's visible from the street, which is why our entire method is "load at the door." The truck backs to the apron, the crew works the bay, and the driveway never becomes a staging area. If your community has a gate code, a construction-vehicle window or a rule about trucks on the street, tell us at booking and we'll work inside it.
No basement means three storage zones, not one. The garage is the obvious one, but the attic over it and the crawl space under the house are where the sedimentary layers are. We bring attic contents down the pull-down stairs ourselves and pull crawl-space boxes out, which is not a job you want to do in a Carolina August.
The mature subdivisions have narrower approaches than the new ones. In the 1980s and 1990s neighborhoods off Kildaire Farm, Cary Parkway and Tryon, mature oaks overhang the driveway and cul-de-sac turnarounds are tight. We size the truck to the approach rather than blocking a neighbor in.
Selling the house? Say so. A garage that photographs as "spacious" is worth real money in a Cary listing, and we'll sequence the clear so it's done before the photographer, not after.
"Fifteen years of accumulation, gone between lunch and school pickup. They separated the donate pile without being asked and swept the slab. My car sleeps indoors now."
"Selling the house — agent said the garage had to read 'spacious.' One truck load later it does. Nothing ever touched the driveway, which mattered on our street."
"They even handled the awkward stuff — unbolted the old shelving, told me exactly which paint cans needed the county drop-off, took every single other thing. Honest crew."
How much does a garage cleanout cost in Cary?
Truck-fill: 1/4 $295, 3/8 $415, 1/2 $525, 5/8 $625, 3/4 $720, 7/8 $810, full $895. A single bay is usually $295; a typical two-car garage about $525; a packed one 3/4 to full. Heavy singles are flat — treadmill $155, garage fridge $221, chest freezer $196, home gym $192, lawn mower $88, tires $117. $75 minimum, no NC sales tax on the service.
Does the Town of Cary just pick this up?
Cary isn't on Raleigh's $35 Bulky Load program — that's for Raleigh addresses. The Town of Cary runs its own scheduled curbside collection; check townofcary.org for current rules. Either way it's curbside: you carry it to the street and it waits there, which is what the HOA objects to.
Will anything sit at the curb?
No. Everything goes from the garage floor into the truck. Nothing is staged on the driveway or at the street at any point in the job.
What about paint, propane and chemicals?
Wet paint, solvents and propane legally can't ride on our truck — those go to Wake County's household hazardous waste drop-off. We consolidate and stage them for you and take everything else, dried-out and empty cans included.
Do you clear the attic over the garage and the crawl space?
Yes — no basements in North Carolina means those two spaces are where the overflow goes. We bring attic contents down and pull crawl-space boxes out as part of the same job.
Is it cheaper than a traditional truck-fill hauler?
Not on raw volume — Junk Doctors publishes $135 minimum to $738 full truck, McJunk $175 to $695 plus a $10–$50 trip charge, $40 mattress surcharge, $10 per tire and $10 per CRT TV. Our full truck is $895, quoted from photos before we arrive, with the sorting, the sweep and every surcharge-worthy item already inside the number.