Hoarding Cleanup in Ottawa
Discreet, judgement-free hoarding cleanouts at your pace.
Hoarding cleanup is a paced, sorted clear-out of a home where belongings have built up past the point of safe living. It is not a bulk haul. We work room by room across Ottawa and Gatineau, look at what is there instead of bagging it blind, set aside documents, valuables and keepsakes, and remove the rest. Nobody is judged and nobody is rushed.
What we handle.
Hoarding cleanup takes patience, careful sorting, and respect for the person and the belongings involved. Our crew works room by room with the homeowner or family, separating keepsakes from waste and handling biohazards safely. We donate and recycle whatever we can and leave the home clean and walkable.
- Compassionate, confidential crews who work at your pace
- Careful sorting to recover valuables, documents, and keepsakes
- Safe handling of biohazards, sharps, and spoiled material
- Full haul-away plus a deep clean of the cleared space
Everything the job covers.
Sorting, not hauling
The difference between a hoarding cleanup and a junk removal is that nothing leaves the house without being looked at. Cash, jewellery, medals, photographs and unopened mail turn up inside bags that read as rubbish from the doorway. We sort into keep, donate and go as we work.
Documents and identification
Passports, birth certificates, health cards, deeds, wills, tax records, cheque books and bank statements come out of the pile into a box that goes straight to whoever is handling the affairs. Paperwork lost during a clear-out is the thing families phone about afterwards, so it is treated as its own category rather than a lucky find.
Discretion, on your terms
Tell us at booking how visible you want this to be. Where the vehicle parks, whether loads go out bagged rather than loose, what time of day suits, whether anything is said at the door. Those are your calls and we would rather be told than guess.
Sharps, spoiled food and soiled material
Needles turn up more often than people expect, and in Ottawa they cannot go in the garbage or the recycling at all. Ottawa Public Health points to By-law 2024-453 and to more than 75 publicly accessible needle drop boxes across the city, with 3-1-1 as the number if you would rather someone came and collected. Sharps go into a rigid container, never a bag. Spoiled food, soiled bedding and fouled material are bagged where they sit instead of being carried through the house.
The whole load, in as many trips as it takes
Everything that comes out is loaded and hauled in the same job. We separate donations and recyclables as we go, so usable furniture, metal and electronics leave on a different route from the landfill load.
The clean underneath
Floors nobody has seen in years need more than a sweep. Vacuuming, washing, deodorising, and carpet steam extraction where the carpet is worth saving. If what turns up underneath is damaged, we tell you what we found rather than covering it back up.
Start to finish.
The first call, which costs nothing
Most people who ring us are not the person living in the home. Adult children, siblings, landlords and property managers make up a lot of it, and the questions are the same three: how long, how discreet, and how do we do this without making things worse. Ask them. Nothing is booked on that call.
Walk the house, agree a plan
We look at every room, agree the order they get done in, and give an honest number of days. A plan the household has seen and agreed to in advance is what stops a job stalling on day two, which is where most hoarding clear-outs fail.
One zone at a time
A room, or part of a room, cleared and finished before the next is opened. Visible progress is what keeps people going, and it means the house is never left worse than we found it if a day has to end early.
Every decision belongs to the household
Keep, donate, go. The homeowner or the family member with authority makes the calls. If an item needs thinking about, we move on and come back to it. If the day becomes too much, we stop and return another day. Pushing does not make the job finish sooner.
Haul, clean, and say what we found
The loads go out, the cleared space gets cleaned, and you get told what was behind the piles: water damage, mould, pest activity, anything structural. Some of that we handle, some needs a different trade, and we will tell you which one you are looking at.
Ottawa's three-item limit is why these clear-outs stall
Since 2024 the City of Ottawa has collected three items of garbage per household every two weeks, and a bulky item such as a dresser or a mattress counts as one of the three on its own. Anything above the limit has to go out in a City branded yellow bag, and anything over the limit that is not in one is left at the curb with a courtesy tag explaining why. For an ordinary household that is a mild annoyance. For a hoarded house it is the reason a family that started in January is still carrying bags out in April. None of it applies to us. We are not a collection truck, so the count does not matter and the house can be cleared in one continuous job instead of three items a fortnight.
What drives the price.
Every hoarding job is quoted after a walk-through, because the two things that move the number most are volume and how much sorting you want. A cleanout where every bag is opened and checked takes far longer than the same volume hauled straight out, and which of those you want is your call, not ours. The rest of it: how many days the job runs and whether it is deliberately paced across more than one, access such as stairs, a walk-up, an elevator booking or where a truck can legally park, how much of the load is ordinary waste against sharps or spoiled material, whether floors and carpets are cleaned afterwards, and whether anything is going to donation. You get a figure before anything moves. Call (613) 852-4059 and we will book the walk-through.
Hoarding Cleanup, answered.
Still unsure? Call or text (613) 852-4059 and we will tell you straight.
Only if you want them to. Tell us at booking what you need and we work to it: where the vehicle parks, loads going out bagged rather than loose, an early start or a later one, nothing said at the door. We do not photograph the inside of a home for marketing, and we do not discuss a job with anyone who is not part of it.
Do not book a crew yet. A clear-out done to someone rather than with them tends to be undone within a year, and it costs you the relationship you will need for the next attempt. Ottawa has real support for exactly this. The Ottawa Hoarding Response Coalition, formed under Options Housing and CMHA Ottawa, runs a Hoarding Assistance Team for people in supportive and subsidised housing whose housing is at risk, plus a 16-week peer-led Buried in Treasures workshop. Start there. We will still be here.
Longer than a junk removal, and almost never one day. It depends on volume, the number of rooms, how much sorting you want, and how quickly the household can make decisions, which is usually the real limit rather than the lifting. Some jobs are spread across several days on purpose, with gaps in between, because that is what the person can manage. You get a realistic number of days at the walk-through rather than an optimistic one.
Because nothing leaves unopened. Documents, identification, cash, jewellery and photographs are pulled into their own box and handed to whoever is handling the affairs, never binned on someone's judgement call. If we are unsure about an item, it goes in the keep pile and you decide later. That is slower, and it is the whole reason to call a hoarding crew instead of a bulk hauler.
Not legal advice, but here is the starting point. The Landlord and Tenant Board's own Form N5 instructions say a first N5 in six months gives the tenant seven days to correct the problem and is void if they do, with a termination date at least twenty days out. The Ontario Human Rights Commission separately treats mental health disability as engaging a duty to accommodate in housing, and names hoarding among the harder behaviours to accommodate. Notice paired with help clears units. Notice alone produces hearings.
Yes, and we would rather say so before you book than halfway through a room. Blood, human waste in quantity, and anything connected with a death in the home are a separate specialism with its own handling rules, and that work should go to a firm that does only that. Asbestos and anything structural need the relevant trade. Mould found behind a cleared pile we do handle, quoted as its own scope on the same property.
Where these facts come from
The three-item curbside limit quoted above comes from one City page, and it is the number a hoarding cleanout is measured against. Everything else on this page is method rather than regulation, which is why there is one source here and not a list.
Need hoarding cleanup?
Call or text for an up-front quote. Same-day and next-day service across Ottawa and Gatineau.