The 7 Most Disgusting Things We've Found During Junk Removal Jobs in Westchester

We don't judge. That's genuinely our policy, and we mean it. You could call us tomorrow and say "I have a room I haven't opened since 2008 and I'm pretty sure something is living in it," and we would show up, nod professionally, and get to work. We have seen things. Westchester homes hold secrets, and for some reason, people keep hiring us to uncover them.

In the spirit of full transparency — and because some of this stuff is genuinely too good not to share — here are the seven most unforgettable things we've hauled out of Westchester basements, garages, attics, and the occasional room that shall not be named.

1. A Chest Freezer with "Surprises" Inside

Picture this: a Yonkers garage cleanout, summer, July. The homeowner says there's an old chest freezer in the back that "might have some stuff in it." She is not wrong. The freezer has been unplugged for — her best estimate — somewhere between four and six years. It's padlocked. She doesn't have the key.

When we finally got it open, we found a full side of beef, several unlabeled bags of what might have once been vegetables, and a birthday cake still in the box. The birthday on the cake? 2017. Someone out there turned 50 and their cake ended up here. We chose not to investigate further. We removed the entire unit, sealed, as one unit.

The lesson: if you padlock a chest freezer, at least leave yourself a note about what's inside.

2. Fourteen Broken Treadmills

Not one. Not three. Fourteen. In a Scarsdale basement so big we didn't even see all of them right away — we kept turning corners and finding more. Each one had something wrong with it. The belt was torn on this one. The motor was gone on that one. One had a crack running straight down the display screen like it had been struck by lightning, or possibly by a frustrated homeowner at 6am who was done with New Year's resolutions.

The homeowner's explanation was simple: "I kept buying new ones because I thought fixing the old one would cost too much." When you add up fourteen treadmills at anywhere from $400 to $2,000 each, the math stops making sense pretty fast. But that wasn't our problem to solve. Our problem was getting them out of a basement with a narrow staircase. We solved it. Don't ask how.

3. A Waterbed. In 2024.

Someone in Yonkers bought a waterbed in 1987, moved it into the master bedroom, and apparently decided that's where it would live forever. We're not saying it wasn't comfortable. We're not saying the man didn't love that waterbed. We're just saying it weighs roughly the same as a compact car when it's full, the liner had developed a slow leak at some point in the early 2000s that left a distinctive smell, and it took three of us an hour just to get it drained enough to move.

Waterbeds are the ghosts of the 80s. They're still out there. We've hauled several. If you have one, please know we're ready for it.

4. A Mystery Box Collection (Thousands of Them)

An Ossining attic, summer cleanout. The homeowner, a retired postal worker, collected boxes. Not antique boxes, not anything particularly valuable — just boxes. Shoeboxes, Amazon boxes, gift boxes, wine crates, that weird little box watches come in, a box for a bread machine he'd never used. He had been collecting them since roughly 1991 and had filled an attic so completely that the floor was no longer visible.

They were all neatly stacked, which somehow made it more unsettling. He knew exactly what he had. He could describe, in detail, the box in the third stack from the left, four layers down. When we asked why he'd kept them, he looked at us like we were the strange ones. "Because you never know," he said. He has a point. We still took them all.

5. A Home Gym That Had Become a Storage Unit

There's a version of this in almost every home in Westchester, but one job in particular stands out. The homeowners had converted a spare room into a "gym." Stationary bike, free weights, a rowing machine, a squat rack, a pull-up bar, and a TV on the wall. Great. Excellent. Except at some point — they estimated around 2015 — they had started storing "just a few things" in the room. By the time we showed up, the squat rack held six boxes of Christmas decorations, the stationary bike had about forty pounds of clothing draped over it, and the rowing machine was under a piece of furniture that had been broken down for transport, then apparently forgotten.

The weights were still there. They will always be there. Weights are eternal. We moved those too.

6. An Entire Ham Radio Setup, Still Operational

A garage in New Rochelle, full cleanout. In the back corner, surrounded by decades of garage debris, was a ham radio station that could have been used to contact submarines. The homeowner's late father had been a serious hobbyist — we're talking multiple transceivers, a tower of equipment, a logbook going back to 1979, and an antenna cable that ran through a hole in the garage wall and up to the roof. The gear was clean. Dusted. The logbook was filled with careful handwriting noting call signs and locations from all over the world.

It was actually kind of beautiful, in the middle of all that junk. We hauled the equipment to a ham radio club in the area that was happy to take it. That one felt like a win.

7. The Doll Room

We're going to keep this short because honestly it's the right call. An attic in a very nice home in White Plains. The attic was filled, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, with porcelain dolls in glass cases. Hundreds of them. Maybe more than a hundred. They were all facing the door. We are professional junk removal operators and we don't spook easily. We are also human beings. We took one look and all three of us silently agreed to get it done as fast as physically possible and never speak of it again. We're speaking of it now because enough time has passed.

Porcelain dolls are heavy, by the way. And their eyes are very realistic. That's just a fact.

We Haul It All. No Judgment (Except for the Dolls, But We Still Hauled Them)

Here's the thing about all of these jobs: every single one of them ended the same way. We showed up, we got to work, we hauled everything out, and the homeowner walked away from a space they could actually use again. The chest freezer, the fourteen treadmills, the waterbed, the boxes, the gym that wasn't a gym — it was all just stuff that needed to go. We don't care what it is or why you have it. We've heard every story and we've seen worse than yours.

If you're sitting on something you've been too embarrassed to deal with — or if you're pretty sure your basement might have achieved sentience at this point — give us a call at (914) 294-4895. Real Deal Junk Removal serves all of Westchester County. We've hauled everything from Scarsdale basements to Yonkers garages to Ossining attics, and we will haul yours too.

Whatever it is, we've probably seen worse.