Locally Owned Dumpster Rental in Gainesville Since 2013

Dale Vickery grew up out here, in a brick ranch north of town with a daylight basement under half of it, and went to work for a local remodeling crew out of school. He spent most of his twenties in Hall County basements, crawlspaces and attics — pulling cabinets, stripping shingles in July, breaking out old footings and retaining walls, and clearing basements that had not been properly emptied in decades — watching the same problems repeat themselves. The container never came when it was supposed to. When it did, the invoice had grown. Nobody ever warns a homeowner that broken block, brick and mortar will hit legal transport weight in a box that still looks half empty, or that an open can left through a wet week comes back heavier than it went out, so the can that sounded generous on the phone is at payload while it is half full, and then it sits in the driveway too heavy to move.

In 2013 he bought a used roll-off truck and four cans, parked them on 344 Northside Dr, and started answering the phone himself. Dale still takes most of the calls and still runs the dispatch board. The first job was a shingle tear-off on a house off Green Street for an owner whose previous hauler had canceled twice while the crew stood on the roof waiting. She still calls us, and she still tells the story.

Word moved the way it does here — through contractors, through neighbors, through the man at the supply counter who mentions that the dumpster people actually showed up. Then three things settled it: severe weather weeks in spring, when a line of storms puts a fortnight of roof, fence and tree work on the books over a weekend; the January and February ice events, which do the same thing to hardwoods and take a day of routing away while they are at it; and the first week of May, when the summer open burn ban lands and every brush pile in Hall County needs another route for five months. We added trucks as the calls came in rather than borrowing against volume we did not have yet. 13 years on we run a small fleet, we still dispatch from 344 Northside Dr, and the phone still rings at a desk with somebody local behind it.

Why we care about getting the quote right

The dumpster industry has an image problem and it is largely self-inflicted. Low teaser rates, a tonnage allowance buried in the fine print, then a bill with an overage charge nobody explained. We priced against that from day one. When you call, we ask what you are throwing away, what it weighs, how long you need it and where it is going. Then we give you a number that includes delivery, pickup, the rental window and disposal. If we think you are about to order the wrong size, we say so — even when the wrong size is the more expensive one.

What being local actually buys you

It is not a slogan. It means our dispatcher knows which Gainesville driveways off Browns Bridge Road, Green Street and the north Hall roads will take a 30 and which ones want a 20 set close to the basement walkout; which frontages in the older streets around the square are too tight to put anything on the pavement at all; which addresses sit inside the City of Gainesville, where the street rules run through Code Sec. 4-4-2 and City Public Works, which sit in unincorporated Hall County, where there is no curbside collection at all and the County is the government, and which sit in Oakwood, Flowery Branch, Clermont, Lula or Gillsville, where a different counter answers; that a job fronting US 129, SR 365 or Jesse Jewell Parkway is on a state route maintained by the Georgia Department of Transportation rather than a city street; and roughly what a 1930s house with a daylight basement, a crawlspace and eighty years of storage produces when it finally gets cleared out. It means that when an ice storm crosses North Georgia and half the county wants a container in the same week, our trucks are already here.

We have seen the mistakes so you do not have to

The four that cost people the most money, in order: sizing by volume when the debris is dense, because concrete, block, brick and mortar all hit payload while the box still looks half empty; forgetting that these houses have a downstairs, so a clear-out that reads like a 20 on the main floor is really a 30 once the basement, the crawlspace and the attic are counted; assuming the curb will absorb the overflow, when the City will not collect building materials, roofing debris, lumber, siding or carpet under Sec. 4-3-9 and Hall County runs no residential curbside collection at all — twelve compactor sites, bags of 39 gallons or less, commercial haulers excluded; and leaving an open container out through a wet week, because north Georgia gets about 53 inches of rain spread right through the year and every inch of it is weight you pay for at the scale. Every one of those is avoidable with one honest conversation before delivery.

We have cleared basements, crawlspaces and attics out of houses that had not been emptied since the war, rental turnovers where a unit changes hands and thirty years goes out in a fortnight, ice-storm damage where the limbs came down across a fence line and the fence went back the following week, storm damage where the ceilings, the insulation and half the drywall came down before the roof went back on, deck and screen-porch tear-offs where the footings came out with the frame, roof tear-offs that went out by weight rather than volume, kitchen and bath gut-outs where the cabinets and drywall went straight into the can because no collection program on either side of the city limit line will take them, driveway aprons, chimneys and retaining walls broken out into 10 yard cans, brush and limb wood run as clean separate loads because Georgia will not let them ride in a mixed one, storefront and restaurant fit-outs on the square and along Jesse Jewell Parkway, and estate cleanouts where a family had a fortnight to empty a house on Green Street. Every one of those loads behaves differently at the scale house, and knowing that in advance is most of the job.

Credentials and cover

• Full commercial general liability and auto cover — certificates available on request for GCs and property managers, with additional insured endorsements where a contract calls for one
• Workers’ compensation cover for every driver on the road
• Material taken only to facilities permitted under Georgia’s solid waste rules at Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. Chapter 391-3-4, with the permit-by-rule conditions at 391-3-4-.06 requiring covered, substantially leakproof, durable containers and disposal at permitted facilities only
• Clean corrugated cardboard and scrap metal pulled out of loads and routed for recycling — it keeps weight off a bill charged by the ton at the gate, and Hall County Code Sec. 8.60.190 requires recovery of recyclable corrugated cardboard in any case
• Liquids and asbestos kept out of every container, loads covered on the road as Hall County Code Sec. 8.60.160 requires, and clean concrete, brick and rock kept separate from mixed loads so it can be routed to an inert facility rather than buried

Contractors and property managers: ask for our COI when you set up an account. We can usually have it emailed the same day.