Junk removal in Richmond.
We clear junk and run cleanouts in the village of Richmond in Ottawa, on the Jock River, in the new streets going up around it, and on the rural properties and long lanes past those. Three different jobs share one place name here.
Richmond was laid out in 1817 and settled from 1818, which makes it older than the city it now sits inside. It was incorporated as a village in 1850, went into Goulbourn Township in 1974, and became part of the City of Ottawa on 1 January 2001. What is left of that beginning is a small core of stone and red brick under mature trees.
Wrapped around the core is the other Richmond: Richmond Meadows by Mattamy, and Fox Run by Caivan Communities and Metric Homes, built on fields. Two streets can be two centuries apart. Nowhere else we cover has that spread inside one place name.
Describe the property.
Village lot, new build, or acreage with outbuildings. That one answer changes the truck, the crew and the plan.
(613) 852-4059Two hundred years apart, four minutes by road.
We publish no percentage for how much of Richmond predates 1978, because nobody has measured one. The shape is plain enough: an old core, a new ring, open country past both.
The core, and what comes out of it
Genuine pre-1978 and in places pre-1900 stock. Plaster and lath rather than drywall, narrow stairs, doors cut for furniture that no longer exists. Lead-era paint is ordinary here rather than unusual. None of that touches carrying boxes and furniture out. It matters the moment a wall or a ceiling is coming down, which is a different scope.
Richmond Meadows and Fox Run
Bare lots, a young canopy, an entirely different pile: packaging, offcuts, flooring and tile remnants, and a garage that filled before a car ever went in it. Access is easy and the sorting is quick. The constraint is that there is nowhere to stage, so material goes straight onto the truck rather than onto the lawn.
The old core is also recognised as a cultural heritage character area in the City's Village of Richmond Community Design Plan, a lighter designation than the heritage conservation districts elsewhere in Ottawa. It changes nothing about emptying a room, a garage or a shed. It is worth the property owner calling the City before anyone touches a facade or a window.
Water from a well, waste down a pipe.
The City of Ottawa operates six communal groundwater well systems in its rural areas, and two of the six are here: Richmond (Kings Park) and Richmond West. It states that the well water is disinfected using chlorination at each treatment facility, and that other rural residents typically get their water from private wells. Wastewater is where the assumption breaks, because the village is on a piped collection system rather than tanks in the ground.
That matters for one practical reason. On a serviced village lot the truck goes where the driveway goes. On a property with its own septic system the leaching bed decides where the truck stops, because weight on a bed is damage that shows up months later and costs more than the job did. Point at the bed and the well head when we arrive and we work around both.
The driveway is part of the job here.
Richmond sits in a working countryside, and the properties around the village are measured in acres rather than feet of frontage. There is more to clear, because a barn, a drive shed and a detached garage hold whatever three generations decided not to decide about: lumber that was going to be something, scrap steel, fencing, tires, machinery that stopped being repairable at some point nobody wrote down.
And there is more to get past first. A long lane with a culvert on it, a gate cut for a tractor, low branches, a turning space firm in August and soft in April. None of it is unusual and none of it is a problem once it has been said out loud. It is only a problem when a truck arrives expecting a suburban driveway.
What does not go on the truck
Old paint, solvents, fuel, motor oil, pesticides and pool chemicals are their own category, and a farm property tends to hold all six. The City runs one-day household hazardous waste events for them and lists each year's dates and locations on its household hazardous waste page.
Worth saying when you call: whether the address is a home or a working operation. The Trail Waste Facility now carries a permanent ban on industrial, commercial and institutional waste, though commercial leaf and yard waste, metal and e-waste are still accepted. It changes where a load can go.
Your lane needs nothing. The street needs a permit.
A short frontage in the old core and a two-acre lot at the edge of the village are two different situations for the same steel box.
On private ground there is nothing to apply for. The City names the other case directly: a roll off or disposal bin in a roadway or public laneway sits on its list of temporary construction related encroachments, issued under Road Activity By-law 2003-445, and it asks for at least ten business days to process an application. Worth knowing before a bin is ordered rather than after it lands.
The curb is the slow route for anything this size anyway. Three garbage items are collected every two weeks, a bulky item such as a piece of furniture counts as one of the three, and anything over the limit has to be in a City branded yellow bag, which large bulky items and furniture cannot go into. A drive shed does not empty in fortnights.
We are not a collection truck, so none of that binds us. We load the lot in one visit and sort as we go.
Running it yourself is a fair question. The gate is at 4475 Trail Road, off Moodie Drive south of Fallowfield Road, open Monday to Friday from 7 am to 6 pm, closed Sunday, and open on selected Saturdays only, which the City lists on its Trail Waste Facility page. CSA green patch footwear and hi-visibility clothing are required for the Main Disposal Area and Small Load Area #2, and without them you are limited to Small Load Area #1.
One weekend the village is not quiet.
The society behind the Richmond Fair formed in 1841 as the Carleton County Agricultural Society and held its first fall festival in 1844. In 1895 it moved the fair from Bell's Corners to Goodwood Park in Richmond, partly for the horse racing track there, and it still runs on the third weekend in September. If your job lands on it, say so when you book and we agree the approach and where the truck sits in advance.
The growth around the village is planned rather than accidental, in the City's own words. Its Village of Richmond Community Design Plan was initiated in 2008 and records that the earlier Ashton, Munster and Richmond Secondary Plan of 2003 required a servicing study once the village population reached 4,500, which the plan says it was close to at the time of writing. That is why the fields north and west of the core are subdivisions now, and why one village gives us two streams of work: old houses being emptied, new ones being finished. See post-construction cleaning for the second, and demolition services when an outbuilding is coming down rather than being cleared out.
Quoted on the load, not on the postcode.
A load is priced by the space it takes on the truck, adjusted for weight and for how far it has to be carried. In Richmond the carry moves the most: a barn fifty metres from a firm turning space is a different afternoon from a garage at the top of a village driveway, even when the pile looks the same in a photo. Send photos or describe the buildings and the figure comes back before we set out, confirmed on site and agreed before anything is loaded.
No rate card appears here, because a rate card cannot see your lane. How the model works and what other Ottawa haulers publish for the same load sizes are on the pricing page. The rest of the region is on the service areas page.
Richmond, specifically.
Something not here? Text (613) 852-4059.
The village of Richmond in Ottawa, on the Jock River, south of Stittsville and about ten kilometres south west of Kanata. Laid out in 1817, incorporated as a village in 1850, into Goulbourn Township in 1974, and inside the City of Ottawa since 1 January 2001. Richmond Hill and Richmond, British Columbia are different places and we work in neither.
Not necessarily, and this is the thing people get wrong here. Two of the City's six communal groundwater well systems serve Richmond, Kings Park and Richmond West, and other rural residents typically draw from private wells. Wastewater is the surprise: the village is on a piped collection system rather than tanks in the ground. Past the village edge it can flip again to private everything, so we ask instead of assuming.
Usually, and the details decide it, so say them on the phone rather than on the day: the length of the lane, any culvert on it, the gate width, how low the branches hang, whether the turning space is gravel or grass, and roughly where the septic bed and the well head sit. We keep a loaded truck off a leaching bed and off soft spring ground, which sometimes means staging nearer the road and carrying further.
Not on a truck with the rest of the load. The City runs household hazardous waste events for exactly this, and the limits are what catch an outbuilding: containers larger than 20 litres are not accepted, a load over 100 litres is refused, the service is for Ottawa residents only, and commercial waste is prohibited. A decade of drums in a drive shed is not one trip to an event. Leave them where they are, tell us what the labels say, and we sort the route for each one first.
On your own driveway or lane, no. In the roadway or a public laneway, yes. The City lists a roll off or disposal bin in a roadway or public laneway as a temporary construction related encroachment under Road Activity By-law 2003-445, and asks for at least ten business days to process one. That is a live question on the short frontages in the old core and it never comes up on a two-acre lot.
Where these facts come from
The servicing, permit, hazardous waste, landfill and collection rules above are the City of Ottawa's, and the fair dates are the Richmond Agricultural Society's. Each link carries the date we read it in a browser.
- City of Ottawa, Municipal well systems read
- City of Ottawa, Village of Richmond Community Design Plan read
- City of Ottawa, Temporary construction related encroachments read
- City of Ottawa, Household hazardous waste read
- City of Ottawa, Trail Waste Facility Landfill read
- City of Ottawa, Curbside garbage collection read
- Richmond Fair, History of the Richmond Agricultural Society read
Clearing a property in Richmond?
Call or text for an up-front quote. Same-day and next-day service across Ottawa and Gatineau.