Sizing
What Size Dumpster Do I Need in Detroit?
Detroit debris hits the weight limit long before it fills the box. A size-by-size guide to 10 through 40 yard roll-offs, plaster and lath, basements, roofs and what fits your drive.
The single most common call we take at the yard on Meyers is some version of "I'm gutting a house off Grand River, what size do I need?" And the honest answer is that in Detroit the size question is really a weight question. This city's housing stock is old, it is brick, and what comes out of it is dense. People who order by eyeballing the pile almost always order one size too big, then wonder why a half-full container hit its weight allowance.
After a decade of pulling cans out of Brightmoor, Morningside, Bagley and Jefferson-Chalmers, the pattern is consistent. Volume tells you whether the debris fits. Weight tells you whether the truck can legally take it down the Jeffries. On a Detroit job those two numbers disagree more often than they agree.
Plaster and lath: the number that decides your size
If you remember one thing from this page, make it this. Plaster and lath runs roughly two to three times the weight of drywall for the same volume. Wood lath nailed to studs, two or three coats of lime plaster over it, often a skim coat on top, sometimes a second layer where somebody plastered over plaster in the 1950s. That wall assembly is mostly sand and lime and it is heavy.
Detroit has an enormous inventory of pre-1940 brick bungalows, Tudors, four-squares and colonials, and essentially all of them are plaster over lath unless somebody already re-rocked them. So when a contractor tells you a 30 yard handled his last gut, ask where the house was. A 1988 suburban build with drywall walls has almost nothing in common with a 1926 bungalow in Russell Woods.
Practically, that means a plaster gut wants a 20 yard roll-off where a drywall gut of the same house would take a 30. You will not fill the box to the rails. You are not supposed to. You are filling it to the weight allowance and leaving air on top, and that is the correct outcome, not a wasted rental.
The five sizes, side by side
Here is how our fleet actually sizes up against Detroit work. Footprints are the container itself — add three to four feet at the back for the door to swing and roughly sixty feet of straight approach for the truck to set it down.
| Size | Footprint (L×W×H) | Typical weight allowance | Pickup loads | Best-fit Detroit jobs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 yard | 12 ft × 8 ft × 3.5 ft | 1–2 tons | ~3 | Chimney tear-down, porch steps, garage slab, small concrete or brick load, one-room plaster demo, tight driveway in a historic district |
| 15 yard | 16 ft × 8 ft × 4 ft | ~2 tons | ~4–5 | Kitchen and bath gut in a bungalow, heavy basement cleanout, single-layer roof on a small house, alley placement where a 20 will not turn |
| 20 yard | 22 ft × 8 ft × 4.5 ft | ~3 tons | ~6–8 | The Detroit workhorse. Plaster-and-lath gut of a floor, full house cleanout, two-layer tear-off, mixed rehab debris |
| 30 yard | 22 ft × 8 ft × 6 ft | ~4 tons | ~9–12 | Whole-house cleanout with furniture, bulky light debris, framing and siding, larger four-square or Tudor rehab where the plaster is already out |
| 40 yard | 22 ft × 8 ft × 8 ft | ~4–5 tons | ~14–16 | Commercial and light industrial, large bulky-but-light loads, big estate or hoarder clearouts, roof and siding combined on a large house |
Notice the 30 and the 40 have the same footprint as the 20. They are taller, not longer. That matters two ways: a tall box does not help you if the debris is dense, because you hit weight before you reach the top rail, and a tall box is harder to load over the side when you are pitching plaster out a first-floor window. Our full dumpster size comparison lays out the specs if you want them next to each other.
Basements add a whole floor you forgot about
Almost every Detroit house has a full basement. Not a crawl, not a slab — a full below-grade floor with a coal chute, a milk door, the footprint where an octopus furnace used to sit, and a cast-iron waste stack running up through it. Owners walk the two floors above grade, do the math, and then open the basement door.
Sixty or seventy years of storage lives down there. Old shelving, canning jars, a workbench built in place, carpet remnants, a laundry tub, storm windows stacked against the wall. On an estate or vacant-house job the basement is routinely a third to a half of the total volume, and it is the part nobody photographs before they call. Budget for it — our basement and garage cleanout guide covers the approach.
It also slows loading, because everything comes up a narrow stair. Sometimes the right answer is a 20 with a next-day swap rather than a 40 sitting half loaded for a week on an empty block, which is its own risk when scrappers are working the neighborhood.
Brick, block and concrete want their own container
Chimneys, porch piers and steps, garage slabs, sidewalk sections, foundation walls, block from a collapsed rear addition. All of it is heavy debris and none of it belongs mixed into a general rehab load. A 10 yard box of broken concrete will out-weigh a 30 yard box of framing lumber without breaking a sweat.
The move is a separate clean load in a 10 yard, filled maybe two-thirds and no higher. Clean concrete, brick and block can go to a recycler as long as it is not contaminated with wood, plaster and trash, so keeping it separate is the cleaner path anyway. That is what our concrete and heavy debris service is set up for.
A full gut is rarely one container
Take a typical 1,200 square foot brick bungalow — Bagley, Grandmont-Rosedale, East English Village, take your pick. Full gut to the studs: plaster and lath off every wall and ceiling on two floors, flooring up, cabinets and fixtures out, basement cleared. That is not one container. It is usually two 20 yard pulls, sometimes three if the attic was finished or there is a garage coming down with it.
Planning for two pulls beats forcing one. You get a fresh empty box the next day, the crew never stops to tetris, and you do not end up with an overloaded can we legally cannot lift. Next-day swap-outs are standard for us. Our write-up on rehab and flip debris in Detroit goes deeper on staging a gut across multiple pulls.
Before any of that, pull your salvage. Old-growth lumber, doors, hardware, radiators, clawfoot tubs, mantels, common brick — there are real buyers for all of it here, and every piece comes out of your container volume.
Roof tear-offs go by squares and layers
Roofing is the one job that sizes cleanly, because you can measure it. Count squares, count layers. A rough working figure for three-tab asphalt is around 250 pounds per square per layer; architectural shingle runs heavier. Detroit roofs commonly carry two layers and occasionally three.
A single-layer tear-off on a small bungalow often fits a 15 yard. Two layers on a larger house pushes you to a 20. Slate or clay tile on one of the bigger Boston-Edison or Palmer Woods houses is a different animal entirely — call before you order, because tile weight will surprise you. Our roofing dumpster rental page covers placement close to the drip line so your crew is not walking bundles across a yard.
What actually fits on the property
Detroit's older grid was laid out for narrower cars and narrower drives. Plenty of pre-war lots have a driveway barely wide enough for a mirror-to-mirror pass, with a brick pier or a mature maple pinching it further. A 22 foot container needs the length to sit and room for the truck to back straight and lift. That reality overrides the debris math more often than people expect: the right size is sometimes just the largest one that fits.
Rear alleys are the other half of it. A lot of these blocks have alley access and on some of them it is the only sensible placement. But many alleys are unmaintained, some have been legally vacated, some are blocked by fly-dumping, and after a thaw a few are soft enough to bury a loaded truck to the axle. We know which alleys off Livernois, Van Dyke and Grand River run clean and which do not, and that knowledge is genuinely half the job.
Wherever it goes, protection boards go under the rails as standard — freeze-thaw has already done enough to Detroit driveways and aprons without us adding to it. There is more on that in our driveway protection guide.
Winter and spring change the answer
Ice on a sloped drive will stop a delivery, full stop. A loaded roll-off truck on a glazed apron is not a risk worth taking, and neither is a container sliding toward a garage door. Salt and plow windrows pile against a parked can, and one left too long in February will freeze to the ground hard enough that it needs to be broken loose. In winter, smaller and quicker beats bigger and parked.
Spring is the opposite problem. Thaw leaves ground soft, and grass or gravel that held a truck in August will rut in April. If your only placement is off the pavement, say so and we will plan the approach.
How to describe the job so we size it right the first time
Give us these six things and we will almost always get it right on the first call:
- Year and construction. Pre-war brick with plaster, or a newer build with drywall. This is the biggest single lever.
- Square footage and how many floors, and say plainly whether the basement and attic are in scope.
- What the debris actually is. Plaster, framing, flooring, shingles, concrete, household goods, or a mix — and which of those dominates.
- Any masonry. Chimney, porch, slab, foundation. Say so up front so we can plan a separate clean load.
- Where it goes. Driveway width, slope, alley or street, and anything overhead. Low wires and branches decide placement.
- Your timeline. One pull or a staged gut over two weeks changes the recommendation entirely.
Two things we will ask you about in return. First, asbestos. Pre-1980 Detroit houses routinely carry it in floor tile and mastic, pipe and duct wrap, plaster skim coats, siding and roofing felt, and we cannot take asbestos-containing material in any container. Demolition generally triggers an inspection and notification requirement, and the state regulates that work through EGLE. We would rather reschedule than haul a contaminated load. Second, lead paint — anything pre-1978 is presumed to have it, and the EPA RRP rule carries real weight in a city with Michigan's highest childhood lead-exposure numbers. Our page on asbestos and lead paint in older Detroit homes covers what to look for. Rules and thresholds do change, so confirm current requirements with EGLE, the EPA or the City of Detroit before demolition starts.
One more: yard waste. Michigan keeps grass, leaves, brush and branches out of landfills under Part 115, so anything green has to go as a separate clean load to a composting facility. If you are clearing an overgrown lot along with the house, that is a second container, not a corner of the first.
Talk to us before you order
Sizing over the phone takes about four minutes and it saves an overweight load, a second trip or a container that will not fit the drive. We have run this out of 14286 Meyers Road since 2014, and we will tell you if a smaller box is the right call even when the bigger one is available. Call DTR Dumpster Rental Detroit at (586) 600-7076 for same-day or next-day delivery anywhere in Detroit, Wayne County and metro Detroit, or send the details through our contact page and we will come back with a size and a placement plan.
Questions this guide did not answer? Call (586) 600-7076. We would rather spend two minutes on the phone than have you order the wrong container.