Serving King & Pierce County contractors since 2020
A tear-off is not really a debris job. It is a gravity job. Shingles come off over the eave and land wherever the container happens to be, and the distance between those two things is the entire difference between a crew that works and a crew that carries. In most of Tacoma that distance is decided by the street rather than by the roof.
Tell us which side of the house the tear-off is on. That decides more here than the address does.
On an open site nobody thinks about this, because the container goes wherever is convenient and the roof still lands in it. Tacoma is not an open site. Above the tideflats the streets narrow, the ground tilts, and the obvious spot is frequently on the wrong side of the building altogether.
When that happens the job does not stop — it just gets slower in a way nobody budgeted for. The crew tarps, drops to the ground, then moves the pile a second time by hand or by barrow. On a one-day composition strip that second handling is what turns it into a day and a half.
So the useful thing to settle at booking is not the address. It is which roof face is coming off first and whether a truck can put a box beside it. Sometimes the answer is the alley. Sometimes it is a neighbour's frontage with a word said in advance. Occasionally it is that the good spot has a service line over it and the second-best spot is the real answer. All of those are easier decided the day before than on the morning. Our main Tacoma page covers how the city's streets, grade and overhead lines affect a delivery generally — this page is about what they do to a roof job specifically.
The alley, more often than people expect. Tacoma has genuinely usable alley behind a great deal of its older housing, and for a tear-off it does two jobs at once: it keeps the box off a street that cannot spare the width, and it frequently sits closer to the back roof face than any spot out front. The 15-yard roll-off rides a smaller truck, which is what makes a tight alley workable at all — that is an access decision, not a sizing one.
The driveway, if the pitch allows it. A loaded container has to sit level and stay level. A driveway that falls away sharply from the street is a poor set spot even when it is the closest ground to the roof, and on the north and east end slopes that comes up constantly. The flat patch at the top is often the better answer even though it is further from the work.
The street, with the frontage measured. Workable on a good many blocks, and the thing that decides it is the usable channel once cars are parked on both sides rather than the nominal street width. If you can get the drop spot cleared for the delivery window, that converts a marginal set into a routine one more reliably than anything else.
Commercial and low-slope, on the tideflats and the arterials. A different job entirely: material comes down at a designated point rather than over an eave, so the container goes where the chute or the lift puts it and the site usually has room to spare. Those jobs run a 20-yard or larger depending on the scope.
Rather talk it through? Call the Pierce County office and you will get someone who knows the routes.
(253) 753-8183Everything above is about what the site allows. What the roof needs is a different question, and on the older housing up here the answer is occasionally startling — a tile roof books the smallest container we run rather than a larger one, on weight rather than volume. Our roofing guide sizes a container by the roof type and is worth reading before you order anything but composition.
Then come back to the question this page answers, which is where that container can physically stand once it arrives.
The same work in the other cities that carry a roofing page: roofing containers in Seattle turns on whether you may use the street, Renton roof tear-off on whether the ground is level, and Auburn roofing containers on the difference between a warehouse roof and a house roof. The rest of what we reach is on our Pierce County service area.
That is the right question to ask first, and in a lot of Tacoma it is the one that decides the day. Where the box can sit beside the roof face you are working, the shingles go straight over the edge into it. Where it cannot, somebody carries. Tell us which side of the house the tear-off is happening on when you book, not just the address, and we will work out whether that side is reachable.
Often the best place, and Tacoma has more usable alley than most cities we serve. It puts the box off a narrow street, and it frequently sits closer to the back roof face than anything out front. What we need before the truck comes is the width at the tightest point, whether the alley runs through or dead-ends, and what is overhead.
Then that spot is out, and it is worth knowing before delivery day rather than on it. Setting a container means lifting it clear and lowering it, then lifting it again for the pickup, so a service line above the drop spot rules it out even where the ground is wide open. The older neighbourhoods here carry a lot of overhead service and it hangs lower than it looks from a car.
