How to judge your load size
You don't need to guess perfectly — but a rough sense of your load means you know your price before anyone shows up.
The most common question we get on the phone is some version of "how much do you think my stuff is?" It's a fair question, and most people underestimate — piles look smaller from the inside of a garage than they do on a trailer.
Here's a rough guide to the four main load sizes, with real-world examples to compare against what's in front of you.
1/4 load
About 3.5 cubic yards
A single couch and a chair, one mattress set, a few boxes of garage clutter, or a small bathroom remodel's worth of material.
1/2 load
About 7 cubic yards
A full bedroom set — bed, dresser, nightstands — plus a couch. Or the contents of a packed one-car garage. Or a decent-sized yard cleanup with branches and bagged debris.
3/4 load
About 10.5 cubic yards
Most of a two-car garage, a whole basement worth of furniture and boxes, or a small kitchen or bathroom tear-out with cabinets and fixtures.
Full load
About 14 cubic yards
An entire single-car garage cleared to the walls and floor, or a one-bedroom apartment's worth of household goods. The full trailer is also the benchmark for heavy materials — a full load of concrete or dirt is 4 cubic yards.
A few things that throw off estimates
Disassembled items take up more room than you think. A broken-down sectional is often bulkier than the assembled couch, because the pieces don't nest neatly.
Bagged items add volume fast. Twenty trash bags of clothes take up far more trailer space than the same clothes folded in a dresser.
Heavy, dense material is its own category. Concrete, dirt, sand, and rocks are priced by cubic yardage rather than standard load size — a full load of those is 4 cubic yards, which is a much smaller pile than a full trailer of furniture.
And remember: you don't have to nail it. We confirm the load size when we arrive, before any work starts — so if your estimate is off, you'll know the real number before anything gets hauled.
Still not sure?
Send us a photo or describe the pile — we're good at sizing things up over the phone.