Dumpster Rental in Frog Hollow, CT

Roll-off containers for Frog Hollow homes and jobsites

Frog Hollow is one of Hartford’s seventeen official neighbourhoods and it is the best place in the city to understand what our work actually is. It is dense pre-1940 multifamily — block after block of three-storey buildings on narrow lots, built for a working population between the late nineteenth century and the 1920s, and still housing one. Pope Park is on its western side, the Capitol Avenue corridor runs along the north, and the streets between are close-built, tight and busy.

This is Perfect Six country. The Hartford Perfect Six is the city’s own building type: three storeys, a symmetrical double-bow front, a centre-hall main entrance, and six units, two on each floor. A Connecticut SHPO nomination describes it as essentially a variation on the triple decker, developed by Hartford builders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to house the city’s growing middle- and working-class population, with a later yellow-brick variant popular in the 1920s. Frog Hollow has them in numbers.

And the six is not just an architectural fact, it is a commercial line. Hartford’s city collection covers a single family home, a multifamily of six units or less, or a condo association of six units or less. Everything else arranges private hauling. So the Perfect Six sits exactly on the boundary of the municipal system — and it leaves that system the moment the debris stops being household trash and becomes a renovation. With the city 81 per cent multifamily and 25.7 per cent owner-occupied, and half its housing built before 1950, that is not an edge case here. It is the ordinary condition. Half of Hartford’s housing units were built before 1950, which means lead paint is the working assumption on almost every job in this neighbourhood.

What we know about working in Frog Hollow

Everything about a Frog Hollow job comes back to the lot. These are narrow parcels with the building close to both boundaries, shared drives between buildings, and street parking on both sides. There is frequently not five feet of clear ground between a building and its neighbour, and IFC 2021 §304.3.3 — adopted in Connecticut — says a container of 1.5 cubic yards or more must not be stored in a building or placed within five feet of combustible walls, openings or combustible roof eave lines. Between two wood-framed three-deckers that rules out the side passage entirely, and the honest answer is the front of the drive or the kerb. For the kerb, Hartford’s Public Works Permit Division issues an Obstruction Permit for temporary occupation of the public right-of-way — $50 plus three cents per square foot per day under the city’s published Rules and Specifications, with a certificate of liability insurance required. Call the Permit Division on 860-757-9970 before a container goes in the street, and see our permit notes. On the load: a unit turnover or a whole-building gut goes mixed into one roll-off, with corrugated cardboard and scrap metal separated as mandatory recyclables under CGS §22a-241b. Pull mattresses and electronics first, both of which have free state programmes. And on a building this age, assume lead paint and test anything that might contain asbestos before it moves — Connecticut’s asbestos rules include residential property expressly, and lead paint chips are refused by the city’s bulky programme outright.

• RegionHartford
• Distance from our yard2 miles north-west of our Ledyard Street yard
• Main routesLedyard Street out to Wethersfield Avenue, north and then west on Capitol Avenue into the neighbourhood
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

It is a short run: Ledyard Street out to Wethersfield Avenue, north and west on Capitol Avenue, and we are there in under ten minutes most of the day. Maple Avenue north from the yard is the alternative when Wethersfield Avenue is slow, and New Britain Avenue runs along the southern edge of the neighbourhood. I-84 serves the northern end at the Sigourney Street and Capitol Avenue exits. Parking is the real variable here rather than distance — a box we cannot reach to swap is worse than a box that is too small. Before booking we want the address, the unit count, exactly where the container will sit, and what is going into it.

Routes we run: Ledyard Street out to Wethersfield Avenue, north and then west on Capitol Avenue into the neighbourhood, Maple Avenue north from the yard and west across to the Frog Hollow streets, New Britain Avenue east and west along the southern edge of the neighbourhood, I-84 to the Sigourney Street and Capitol Avenue exits for the northern end.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Frog Hollow

On a private driveway in Frog Hollow the placement question is not really a permit question at all, and that surprises nearly everybody. Connecticut has no per-dumpster fire permit. The only rubbish entry in the state fire code permit table is a permit to operate a commercial rubbish-handling business, and that one is ours to hold rather than yours. What the state has instead is a placement rule. Under IFC 2021 §304.3.3, adopted in the 2022 Connecticut State Fire Safety Code, a container with an individual capacity of 1.5 cubic yards or more must not be stored in a building or placed within five feet of combustible walls, openings or combustible roof eave lines. Five feet is the figure, whatever the dumpster pages written for other states tell you. Every roll-off we run is well over 1.5 cubic yards, so the rule reaches a 10 yard in a Frog Hollow driveway just as much as a 40 yard on a commercial site, and it is the reason the open side of the drive beats the narrow gap beside the house. Keep the box clear of exits, fire-apparatus access and hydrants as well, and no flammable or combustible liquids go in it. A local fire marshal can add requirements of his own, so if the only workable spot is tight against the building, it is worth a call to the fire marshal covering Frog Hollow before we deliver. For a container that has to sit in the public way in Hartford the instrument is the Obstruction Permit from the city’s Public Works Permit Division — temporary obstruction of the public right-of-way, $50 plus $0.03 per square foot per day under the published Rules and Specifications, with a $10,000 performance bond and a certificate of liability insurance. That document never uses the word dumpster, so ring the Permit Division on 860-757-9970 and ask how they want it handled. Outside Hartford the same call goes to the town’s own public works or engineering office, because the answer follows the address rather than any county line. Sidewalks, hydrants and fire lanes stay clear either way. Sort the approval before you book the delivery. It is a ten-minute call that saves a week.

Two more rules reach every job we run, and both are state rules rather than local ones. The first is asbestos, and Connecticut splits it three ways. The Department of Public Health takes the abatement notification and licenses the people who do the work, on ten days’ notice. CT DEEP issues the $300 Special Waste and Asbestos Disposal Authorization that lets the material move. The DAS Office of the State Fire Marshal licenses demolition contractors. The trap on an older Frog Hollow house is that Connecticut is stricter than the federal rule: RCSA §19a-332a-1 defines a facility to include residential buildings, single-family homes expressly included, so there is no owner-occupied carve-out here, and a demolition notification is required for any structure taken down, whether or not asbestos is present. CT DPH publishes a factsheet on asbestos-containing siding shingles in particular, which is a live issue on pre-1940 stock. We cannot take asbestos-containing material in any container. Anything built before 1978 also carries lead paint under the federal RRP rule, and lead paint chips are one of the materials Hartford’s bulky programme refuses outright. The second rule is what may not ride in a construction load: CGS §22a-208x excludes asbestos, clean fill, hazardous waste, radioactive material and liquids — adhesives, paints, oils and tars from construction and demolition waste, and corrugated cardboard and scrap metal are mandatory recyclables under CGS §22a-241b, so they come out of the load and cannot be mixed back in once they are separated. Everything else can be commingled — CT DEEP’s own guidance is that most construction waste is best managed in one roll-off taken to a processing facility. That is why we ask what is going in the box before we quote, and it is not fussiness. Before anything is dug, trenched or a stump pulled, call Call Before You Dig on 811, as CGS §16-345 et seq. requires; Connecticut is CBYD territory. Our permit and placement guide walks through the whole process, and collection, drop-off and bulk-item details are published by the City of Hartford.

The ground is the other local variable, and here it is the frost line that decides both the container size and the approach. Connecticut works to a 42-inch frost depth, so footings in Frog Hollow reach three and a half feet regardless of what sits on top — and once the hole is that deep, a full basement costs almost nothing more, which is why so much of the pre-war housing here has one. Two practical consequences follow. A cleanout starts a floor lower than a sizing guide written for the south would assume: the basement and the attic are the job, and what comes up the bulkhead stairs is storm windows, paint tins, furniture, a workbench and thirty years of boxes. And frost heave, the spring thaw and plain groundwater keep the heavy work coming — footing and foundation spoil, broken concrete and brick out of a cellar floor or a front walk, plaster off a gutted six-family, and wet basement contents after water has come in. All of that is heavy for its volume, so it rides in a small container, often in two hauls rather than one big box, and the wet clay it comes out of weighs a good deal more in April than it does in August. Access moves with the season as well: snowbanks and the plough windrow narrow a drive that took a 30 yard in October, granite kerbing and cars parked both sides of the street decide how much swing the truck has on the older blocks, shared drives between multifamily houses are tighter than they look, and on gravel approaches we would rather move you a day than leave ruts through soft spring ground. Where it all ends up is the part people assume and get wrong. The MIRA trash-to-energy plant in Hartford’s South Meadows has closed, Connecticut has no active MSW landfills, and the state exports a large share of its municipal solid waste — so disposal here is a distance and logistics problem rather than a question of what is banned. A mixed construction load in one box is perfectly legal, and it is what CT DEEP recommends. Household quantities are a different route: Hartford residents take those to the Bulky Waste and Recycling Center, 180 Leibert Road, Tuesday to Saturday, 8:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m., on a green permit for recyclables, free; a blue residential permit at $10.00 for four visits; or a red commercial permit at $50.00 plus a per-load charge — half a ton $40, three-quarters $60, a ton $85 — and that red permit names handymen and landscapers and stops at a one-ton load or a 16-foot trailer. Mattresses and electronics are free there, because Connecticut’s producer-funded stewardship programmes pay for them. Paint, solvents, automotive fluids, batteries and pool chemicals never ride in a container: household hazardous waste for Hartford goes to the MDC Operations Facility at 125 Maxim Road. Every town around us answers all of this differently, because Connecticut has 169 towns, each running its own solid waste arrangements with no county layer above them — the answer changes at the town line.

Sizes we deliver to Frog Hollow