Junk removal in Gloucester.
We clear junk anywhere inside the old City of Gloucester, from Billings Bridge east to Blackburn Hamlet and south past Leitrim to Riverside South. Tell us the street rather than the name, though. Gloucester stopped being a municipality on 1 January 2001, and at 298.5 square kilometres it takes in a 1965 bungalow, a 2015 townhouse and a stretch of protected bog. Those are not the same job.
The name is still useful, and it is still on the mail and on the ward. What it no longer does is describe one kind of house. So this page is built the way the work actually splits: by the decade the street went up, and by what the ground and the servicing do underneath it.
Give us the street.
Blackburn Hamlet and Riverside South are both Gloucester and nothing else about them matches. Call with the address and a photo of the pile.
(613) 852-4059One name, forty years of different houses.
Gloucester began as Township B in 1792, was incorporated as Gloucester Township in 1850 and named after Prince William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, became a city in 1981, and went into the new City of Ottawa in 2001. Braddish Billings, the township's first settler, is why there is a Billings Bridge. The name survives today mostly on the ward.
One number explains most of the housing here. The population went from 37,154 in 1971 to 72,859 in 1981. Gloucester roughly doubled in a decade, which is why so much of it is mid-century, and why the contents of those houses have had fifty years to accumulate.
The mid-century middle
Beacon Hill North and South, Cyrville, Carson Grove, Pine View, Blossom Park and Blackburn Hamlet. Beacon Hill is primarily residential and went up through the 1960s and 1970s; roughly 80 per cent of Blackburn Hamlet dates from 1961 to 1980. These are the full-day jobs: finished basements, a utility room with the original appliances still in it, and a garage that has been absorbing things for fifty years.
The post-2000 south
Riverside South and the Leitrim and Findlay Creek side are the opposite end of the range, effectively all built from 2000 onward. The call there is rarely a lifetime of accumulation. It is renovation debris, packaging and builder leftovers, first-generation decks and fences reaching replacement age, and the contents of a garage that was never meant to store anything.
The parts with no houses on them
A meaningful share of the old boundary is NCC Greenbelt and the Mer Bleue Bog. That is conservation land, not serviceable property, and it is the reason two Gloucester addresses can be ten minutes apart on a map and forty minutes apart by road. Give us the street, not the postal region, and we will tell you the honest arrival window.
One more piece of the old boundary worth naming: Convent Glen and Chapel Hill were inside Gloucester too, and nobody calls them that now. If that is where you are, our Orleans page is the one that describes your street.
The clay underneath, and the paint on the walls.
Soft ground and a shallow water table
Ottawa's sensitive marine clay problem is named after this place. In 1954 the National Research Council established Canadian Geotechnical Research Site No. 1 at South Gloucester, about 24 km south of the city, specifically to study the soft and highly sensitive Leda clays deposited in the now-drained Champlain Sea. The work started because shallow foundations on buildings at the site were settling badly. The published characterisation of that site records a groundwater table taken as hydrostatic at 0.8 m, with leached marine sediment running roughly 22 m down before glacial till and limestone.
For a hauling crew that is not trivia, it is where the truck parks. A loaded vehicle and a full bin are a real load on a soft shoulder or a wet lawn, so we stage on hard surface and we ask before crossing grass. If a job involves breaking a slab, underpinning or excavating next to a footing, the settlement question belongs to an engineer before it belongs to us, and we will say so rather than guess.
Build year decides how a strip-out starts
Gloucester's older stock is mid-century rather than pre-war, and that puts most of it squarely in Health Canada's middle tier. Its guidance: a home built before 1960 probably contains lead-based paint, while a home built between 1960 and 1990 may have it on the exterior and may have smaller but still harmful amounts on interior surfaces. Houses built after 1990 should not contain lead at all.
The practical instruction on that same page is blunt: do not use sanders, heat guns or blowlamps on lead-based paint, because that is what puts it in the air. So on a Beacon Hill or Pine View basement from the seventies, the order of operations matters. We take the debris out. Finding out what is in the paint is a lab sample or a contractor with x-ray equipment, which is not something we offer or claim to.
Servicing is the third variable and it does not split neatly. The urban parts of the old city are on municipal water and sewer; the rural southeast is not. We scope that to the address rather than to the region, because guessing it wrong is how a truck ends up parked on a septic bed.
The jobs that come out of these streets.
On the older side it is whole-property work: junk removal and basement and garage clearouts, estate and pre-sale clearing when a family home changes hands, and hoarding cleanup where a house has been quietly filling for decades.
On the newer side it is material rather than contents: interior demolition and the debris that follows a renovation. Lower-level water is its own call in any decade, and water and flood damage restoration is where that starts. We sort as we load, so usable furniture goes to donation and recyclable material is separated before anything heads for a landfill.
You get the price before we load.
Junk removal is priced on what leaves the property, not by the hour: how much room the load takes on the truck, how heavy it is, how far it has to be carried, how many stairs are between it and the driveway, and where the material is allowed to go. Send photos or show us the space and the figure is agreed before anything moves. How pricing works sets out the whole model, including what competitors publish.
And sometimes the answer is that you do not need us. If you have a truck, one load and a free weekday, the City's Trail Waste Facility Landfill at 4475 Trail Road is a genuine option. Read the hours before you load, because they are not what most people assume. Weekdays are 7 am to 6 pm, Sundays are closed, and the gate opens on selected Saturdays only, which the City lists on its Trail Waste Facility page. Payment at the scale house is contactless. From the east end of Gloucester that is a run to the opposite corner of the city, so the calculation turns on how many trips it takes.
Gloucester, specifically.
The former city ran from Billings Bridge and the Rideau River in the west, across the airport lands, south to Leitrim and Riverside South, and east to Blackburn Hamlet. Beacon Hill North and South, Cyrville, Carson Grove, Pine View, Blossom Park, Rothwell Heights, Hiawatha Park, Bradley Estates and rural Gloucester were all inside it. So were Convent Glen and Chapel Hill, which most people now call Orleans, and our Orleans page is the better fit for those streets.
Not usually, and the detail that catches people is not the count. Ottawa collects three garbage items every two weeks and a bulky item counts as one, but the City also states that large bulky items and furniture cannot be bagged, so a City yellow bag does not buy you an extra sofa. Bins have to be 140 litres or less and under 15 kg, cardboard boxes are not accepted as garbage containers, and collection staff will not reach into a bin to lift a bag out.
Yes. It sat inside the City of Gloucester before amalgamation and it is inside the area we have declared. Expect a different conversation from an older street: most of what we load there is renovation and construction material rather than household contents, and where a build is still live nearby, we will ask where the truck can sit without blocking a working site.
On the hard surface, and we ask before crossing grass. South Gloucester is where the National Research Council put Canada's first geotechnical research site in 1954, specifically to study the soft, highly sensitive Leda clay left by the Champlain Sea, and the water table there is shallow. Outside the serviced urban area we also need to know where the septic bed is, because a loaded truck does not belong on top of one.
Sometimes, and we will say so when it is. The catch is geography and hours. Trail Waste Facility Landfill is at 4475 Trail Road off Moodie Drive, the far southwest corner of the city, which from Blackburn Hamlet or Beacon Hill is a cross-city trip each way. It runs Monday to Friday, 7 am to 6 pm, closed Sundays, and opens on selected Saturdays only, which the City lists on its Trail Waste Facility page. Payment at the scale house is contactless.
Check the paint before anyone starts sanding. Health Canada's guidance is that a home built between 1960 and 1990 may have lead-based paint on the exterior and smaller but still harmful amounts on interior surfaces, and it says plainly not to use sanders, heat guns or blowlamps on it. Most of Gloucester's older stock sits in exactly that window. We haul the debris out; testing paint is a lab or an x-ray contractor's job, not ours.
Where these facts come from
Every external figure on this page, with the date we read it on the live source.
- City of Ottawa, Trail Waste Facility Landfill hours read
- City of Ottawa, curbside garbage collection and the three-item limit read
- Health Canada, Lead-based paint read
- Mayne, Cargill and Miller, Geotechnical characteristics of sensitive Leda clay at Canada test site in Gloucester, Ontario (AIMS Geosciences, 2019) read
- Wikipedia, Gloucester, Ontario read
Clearing something in Gloucester?
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