Bulkhead basement cleanouts in Milwaukee

The short answer

Basement clear-outs are priced by volume: $241 a quarter truck, $338 three-eighths, $431 a half, $513 five-eighths, $587 three-quarters, $732 a full truck. Individual heavy items are flat — a chest freezer is $146, a cast iron radiator is $123, a water heater is $131. Minimum per visit is $75.

No stair charge. No charge for using the bulkhead. No charge for the fact that everything has to come up before it can go anywhere.

What a bulkhead is, and why yours matters

A bulkhead — a cellar door, an areaway, an outside basement entrance — is the pair of angled doors set against the foundation at the side or rear of the house, opening onto a short flight of concrete steps down into the basement. Most pre-war Milwaukee houses have one, and a great many owners have not opened theirs in a decade.

For a cleanout it is frequently the difference between an easy morning and a hard one. The interior basement stair in a Milwaukee bungalow or two-flat is typically steep, narrow, closed on both sides, and finished with a low header at the top that catches everyone on the shoulder exactly once. A chest freezer does not come up it comfortably. Out through the bulkhead, up six concrete steps, straight to the truck — that is a different job.

So the first question we ask on a basement booking is: does your bulkhead open?

Check it before we come

Genuinely worth ten minutes the day before. Common reasons a Milwaukee bulkhead will not open:

• Painted shut. Decades of exterior paint across the seam.
• Rusted hinges or a seized hasp, which is what happens to steel doors that sit through thirty Wisconsin winters.
• Frozen. Between December and March, meltwater runs into the seam, refreezes, and welds the doors down. This is the single most common reason a winter basement job switches to the interior stair.
• Buried. Snow drifts against the side of a house, and the bulkhead is usually on the side that catches the drift.
• Blocked from inside. The inner door at the bottom of the areaway is often stacked against with exactly the things you are trying to remove.
• Grown over. Shrubs, a deck built over it, or an air conditioning condenser placed on the pad in front of it in 1998.

If it will not open, that is fine — tell us and we will bring the crew and the equipment for an interior-stair job. The price is the same either way. We would just rather know before we arrive.

Why Milwaukee basements hold so much

These are not crawl spaces. The older housing stock here — the bungalows of Jackson Park and Enderis Park, the two-flats of Bay View and Riverwest, the four-squares of Washington Heights, the cottages of Lincoln Village — sits on a deep, full-height basement running the footprint of the house, built for coal storage, laundry and food preservation.

What is still down there, forty to a hundred years on:

• Canning shelves. Rows of built-in wooden shelving, frequently still holding jars nobody should open.
• The second refrigerator and the chest freezer. A near-universal Wisconsin fixture. Often one working and one dead, standing beside each other.
• The workbench. Built in place, bolted to the joists, and unremovable in one piece.
• Storm windows and screens. Swapped seasonally for sixty years and never once thrown out.
• Cast iron radiators taken out during a heating conversion and left where they landed, because nobody wanted to carry them up.
• Paint. Every tin since the Carter administration.

The damp, which is the real Milwaukee difference

These basements take on moisture, and it is not a defect so much as a fact of the construction and the geography. Stone or cream city brick foundations, laid without modern damp proofing, minimal perimeter drainage, humid July and August, and — for anything on the east side of the city or along the South Shore in Bay View, St. Francis and Cudahy — a lake a few blocks away doing the rest.

What that means for the contents:

• Upholstery is finished. A sofa or an armchair stored down there for a few summers will be musty in a way that does not wash out. No thrift operation will take it. This is the most common disappointment in a Milwaukee basement clear-out and it is worth knowing before you promise a piece to a relative.
• Cardboard collapses. Boxes stacked on a concrete floor wick moisture from the slab. Lift one and the bottom stays behind.
• Veneer lifts and drawer bottoms swell on wooden furniture.
• Everything is heavier than it looks, because it has absorbed water. Books especially. A box of books is $45 and a damp one weighs half again what you expect.

None of it changes the price. Damp basement contents are ordinary work here and there is no surcharge for it.

Worked example: a Bay View bungalow basement

Bulkhead opens, which makes this the good version of the job.

• Freezer (chest, dead since 2021) — $146
• Refrigerator (standard, the beer fridge) — $164
• Washer — $133
• Dryer — $128
• Dehumidifier — $77
• Large junk pile (canning shelves, boxes, storm windows) — $208

Itemized: $146 + $164 + $133 + $128 + $77 + $208 = $856.

As a three-quarter truck that is $587, saving $856 − $587 = $269. Basements are volume jobs almost without exception — put the whole list in and let the quote pick.

What we cannot take from down there

Basements concentrate the excluded categories, so set these aside in one corner and we will clear around them:

• Paint, stain, varnish and solvents. The shelf of tins. These go through your county's household hazardous waste program — check the current arrangements.
• Motor oil, fuel and antifreeze.
• Old asbestos-wrapped duct or pipe insulation. Pre-war Milwaukee houses sometimes have it on the heating runs. Do not disturb it and do not let us — that is a licensed abatement contractor's job, and it needs handling before a clear-out, not during one.
• Ammunition. Contact your local police non-emergency line for the correct procedure.
• Propane tanks, car batteries, tires.

Booking a basement job

Tell us three things and the day runs itself: whether the bulkhead opens, whether the interior stair has a low header or a turn at the bottom, and whether there is standing water or active damp. Photos help more than descriptions here — a picture of the stairs and a picture of the pile tells us exactly what to bring.

You do not need to move anything up first. Carrying it up is the service. And if the bulkhead is frozen shut in February, say so — we will come with the interior-stair plan and the price will not move.

Frequently asked questions