My First Dumpster

After realizing that the Sanitation Dept. was not going to pick up our garbage, we decided to call for professional help. How much garbage could we possibly have accumulated anyway? Chaim single-handedly carried it all down from the second floor to store in the garage.

I called about 15 companies and each one gave me totally different quotes; anywhere from $300 plus $150 per hour for 3 guys to load the garbage into a dump truck, to $2000 plus tax to get a 10 yard dumpster. I found out that a yard could differ depending on who I spoke to: one guy told me that one yard of garbage was 3 construction bags worth, another told me it was 8.

I chose to go with the company that I could understand, and the secretary was nice to talk to. A Polish woman named Helen who worked for a company called Carty (or maybe I liked them because they sounded like a character in an episode of of PeeWee's Playhouse.) Half of the companies I spoke to were rude, or I literally couldn't understand their English.

3 tons of garbage getting ready to be hauled away

The parking situation proved to be the most stressful. Helen told me that we had to have at least 30 feet of space so that the dumpster could be dropped off and picked up. I felt a bit guilty hogging 4 car spaces in front of the house when we didn't even own a car. The dumpster got dropped off right after the street cleaning crew swept through our side of the street, in a rainy downpour. Christine came over for some physical and moral support, and being a home owner and previous dumper of illegal construction rubble, she told me that we had to begin filling it IMMEDIATELY!!! or others would come by and start throwing in their garbage.

So Christine and I spent most of the day dragging the dusty bags from the garage into the dumpster. Thank goodness it was a rainy day or the dust would have been unbearable!!!!

In the end the scale at the dump-site read 3.29 tons!!!!! We made another 8 bags of garbage since the dumpster went away, which we drove over to Dumbo, and left in my studio building garbage room. Believe it or not, we still have two more walls to deconstruct.