Basement cleanouts in Nashville's older neighborhoods

The short answer

A Nashville basement cleanout is typically three-quarters of a truck, $587, or a half at $431 if the space is partly finished and partly used. The full ladder runs quarter $241, three-eighths $338, half $431, five-eighths $513, three-quarters $587, seven-eighths $661, full $732. Disposal included, and there is no stair charge for bringing any of it up.

Why basements are unusual here

Middle Tennessee sits on clay over limestone, and for most of the twentieth century it was cheaper and easier to build on a crawlspace than to dig. So the overwhelming majority of Nashville houses, especially everything built postwar in Donelson, Madison, Hermitage, Crieve Hall and Bellevue, have no basement at all. That is why garages here are so full.

The exceptions are the older, hillier neighborhoods where the ground made a daylight or walk-out basement sensible in the first place: Green Hills, Belmont-Hillsboro, Woodmont, Whitland, parts of Richland and West End, Lockeland Springs and the older streets of Inglewood. Houses there got a real lower floor, often with an exterior door and a stair from the kitchen.

If your house is one of them, you have an entire extra floor of accumulation that most of your neighbors do not.

What is down there

The list repeats house to house.

The dehumidifier is the tell. In a Nashville basement it has been running most of the year for a decade, and there is usually a second, dead one beside it.

The stair is the whole job

Basement stairs in a 1930s or 1940s Nashville house were built to get a person and a laundry basket down, not to get a chest freezer up.

Expect a narrow run, a low header that you will hit your head on, a turn at the bottom, and a door at the top that opens inward into a kitchen. Some of these houses have an exterior basement door or a walk-out to the back yard, which changes the job completely and is the first thing worth telling us.

None of it changes the price. There is no stair charge, no charge for a low ceiling, and no charge for a long carry up a sloped Green Hills back yard to a truck parked at the top of the drive.

Damp is why most of it is not worth saving

A Nashville basement runs humid. Between the summer dew points and the ground moisture in clay soil, a lower floor that is not actively conditioned and dehumidified stays damp most of the year.

What that does over a decade: cardboard boxes stored on the slab wick moisture from below and fall apart when lifted. Particleboard shelving swells at the base and delaminates. Upholstered furniture stored down there develops a smell that does not come out. Books and photographs foxed and stuck together. Anything metal has surface rust on the underside.

So budget for the fact that a much smaller proportion of a Nashville basement is salvageable than the owner expects. Sorting goes faster once you accept that.

A worked example

A Belmont-Hillsboro basement cleared before the house went on the market.

Washer $133 + dryer $128 + chest freezer $146 + water heater $131 + treadmill $115 + rolled carpet $68 = $721.

That is against a full truck at $732 and three-quarters at $587. If the appliances are genuinely all that is going, book by item at $721. If there are also twenty years of boxes on the shelves, which in a basement there are, the $587 bracket is the better number and probably holds it.

The flood question

Middle Tennessee gets serious rainfall events, and low basements in this city have taken water before. If yours has, the cleanout is a different job.

Anything porous that got wet, and especially anything that has stayed damp through a Nashville summer afterwards, should go rather than be dried out and kept. Carpet removal prices at $71 per room and rolled carpet at $68. For water-damaged bulk, bags price by count: 20 bags $259, 30 bags $385.

If there is standing water, active mold or sewage involved, get a remediation contractor in before a junk crew. We remove contents; we do not do remediation.

Booking one

Tell us the neighborhood, whether there is an exterior basement door or only the interior stair, and roughly how full the space is. If the driveway is steep and curving, which in Green Hills and Forest Hills it usually is, say so, because the truck may stage at the bottom and we will bring more people.

Price up front, disposal included, no stair charge. And clear the path from the bottom of the stair to the door before the crew arrives, because that first ten feet sets the pace for everything else.

Frequently asked questions