Junk removal in The Glebe.

The Glebe is church land. In the 1837 survey the Crown deeded 178 acres to St Andrew's Presbyterian Church as a Clergy Reserve, which is what "glebe" means, and the church began selling it off in the 1870s. Alexander Mutchmor cut 34 lots west of Bank Street in 1872 and named Percy and Ella Streets after two of his children. William Hickey laid out Bloomingvale in 1875 between Bank and Metcalfe. Annexation brought the area inside the city in 1889, and in June 1891 the first electric street car ran down Bank Street to the Exhibition that had opened at Lansdowne in 1888.

The streetcar is the reason the housing looks the way it does. Wikipedia puts it plainly: most Glebe houses "were largely built before 1914." A grander wave followed in the 1910s and 1920s, some of it designed by W.E. Noffke and David Younghusband, much of the rest pattern-book builds in a foursquare style. Then postwar infill after 1945. Then, at Lansdowne, condominiums and townhouses in a redevelopment completed in 2014.

So the Glebe is not one job. It is two, sometimes on the same street.

A pre-1914 house is a carry job: narrow stairs, a basement that has been in continuous use for a century, and materials nobody would specify today. A Lansdowne condo is a scheduling job: a service elevator, a loading dock and a booking window somebody has to reserve before a truck leaves. The question we ask first is which of those two your address is, because the answer changes the crew size, the time on site and what we bring.

Geography does the rest. The Queensway closes the neighbourhood off to the north and the Rideau Canal wraps the east and south, with LeBreton Street South, Carling Avenue and Dow's Lake to the west. That is 2.704 square kilometres bounded on three sides. The newest crossing over the canal, the 123 metre Flora Footbridge, opened in 2019 to pedestrians and cyclists, so it added a way for people to get in and out and nothing at all for a truck. Truck routing into the Glebe is what it always was.

The Glebe has the only genuinely dateable junk removal event in Ottawa. The Great Glebe Garage Sale runs on the fourth Saturday in May, every year, with participating households putting items out across the whole neighbourhood and sellers expected to donate a portion of the proceeds to a designated charity. It has been going since 1986.

By late afternoon a large amount of what came out of those basements is still on the lawn, and that is where a good day turns into a chore. Nobody wants to carry a chesterfield back down the stairs it came up.

This is the section most callers have never heard, and it is what separates the Glebe from every other area we cover.

The Glebe contains two designated heritage conservation districts under Part V of the Ontario Heritage Act. Clemow Estate East was designated by By-law 2011-346, passed on 28 September 2011. The Clemow-Monkland Driveway and Linden Terrace district followed in 2020, and its Plan describes exactly what it covers: the residential properties on both sides of Clemow Avenue between Bronson Avenue and Bank Street, excluding those at the Clemow and Bank intersection; the properties on both sides of Monkland Avenue; and those on the north side of Linden Terrace between O'Connor Street and the east side of Queen Elizabeth Driveway, plus the park land west of the Driveway and the Patterson Creek Bridge.

Inside those boundaries the Plan is blunt about who is covered:

All properties located within the boundaries of the HCD are designated and regulated under Part V of the Ontario Heritage Act regardless of age, type, style or status as contributing or non-contributing.

Now the part that matters for a clear out, because it is good news and almost nobody knows it. Section 10.1 of that Plan lists the work that does notrequire a Heritage Permit, and the first line is "interior alterations or renovations."

Health Canada's guidance is that a home built before 1960 probably contains lead-based paint, and that exterior paint applied between 1960 and 1990 may contain it too. The Glebe's main building era ends around 1914. That is not close to the line.

This is why we treat a Glebe strip out differently from a Glebe clear out. Carrying a dresser out of a room disturbs nothing. Pulling original trim, sanding a stair or opening a wall creates dust, and in a house of this age the safe assumption is that the dust is not clean. Health Canada's own advice for certainty is a lab test on paint chips or a contractor with x-ray equipment, and that is a decision for the owner before the work starts, not a call anybody should make on the day.

We do not test paint and we do not disturb suspect material blind. It matters most on the four jobs where somebody is opening up a building rather than carrying things out of it: water and flood damage restoration, mould remediation, demolition and the heavier end of hoarding cleanup.

Verify the build year of your specific address rather than trusting a decade label for the neighbourhood. Postwar infill exists here. On an unverified address the older assumption is the safe one.

If you have had water in a Glebe basement, you are not imagining a pattern.

The City built the Combined Sewage Storage Tunnel specifically to reduce basement flooding risk in two named places, and one of them is the north end of the Glebe. The other is Centretown. The tunnel is 6.2 kilometres long, it became operational on 20 November 2020, and it cuts overflow volume by up to 43,000 cubic metres per event across approximately 7,000 residential properties.

That is a real improvement and it is not a guarantee about your house. What it tells you is that the north end of this neighbourhood sits on infrastructure the City considered worth six kilometres of tunnel, and that a basement here is worth protecting. The City runs a residential protective plumbing rebate covering backwater valves and sump pumps. The amounts are published on its own page and they change, so read them there rather than from a contractor.

Where we come in is afterwards. Water gets into a century basement, soaks into materials that have been absorbing humidity since before the First World War, and the clock starts. Wet contents out, saturated material out, then dried. Left alone it becomes a mould remediation job instead of a water damage one, and the second costs more than the first.

One Glebe fact is worth knowing before anybody digs or takes anything structural down.

From 1903 to 1904 a large low lying area between Second and Third Avenues was filled in with sand hauled from the land along Carling Avenue. That is a documented historical fact about the area, not a measured soil condition on your lot, and we are not going to pretend it is one. What it justifies is a check. On demolition or excavation work in that pocket, have the ground and the footings looked at rather than assuming native soil, because "it has stood for a hundred years" is a statement about the house already there, not about the one you are planning.

Taking down a building or structure in Ottawa needs a building permit. On top of that, demolition control approval applies where all three of these are true: no building permit for a replacement building has issued, the demolition removes one or more residential dwelling units, and the property sits inside the Area of Demolition Control in Schedule 1 of By-law 2012-377. We have not confirmed which Glebe addresses fall inside that schedule, so check yours rather than taking our word for it. Inside the two heritage districts, add City Council approval on top of both.

And check the trees. The City requires a permit to remove a distinctive tree on private property in the urban area, and the canopy here is mature enough that this comes up more often than people expect.

Sometimes, and a company that will not say so is selling you something.

From the Glebe it is a run to the far southwest corner of the city. The Trail Waste Facility is at 4475 Trail Road off Moodie Drive, and the City publishes its hours as Monday to Friday, 7 am to 6 pm, closed Sundays, open selected Saturdays only. Check which Saturdays before you drive out, because the list changes through the year and the two days most people are free are usually the two the gate is shut.

DIY wins with one load, a vehicle that carries it and a free weekday. It stops winning quickly. Four trips across Ottawa is a day off work and four minimum fees, and the site does not accept asbestos, liquid waste or hazardous waste at all.