Contents-cleaning estimator

Use a per-room box average and a per-box cleaning rate as a first pass. Multiply affected rooms by typical boxes per room to get a box count, then multiply by cleaning minutes per box for the hours. This gives you a defensible planning number for reserves and scheduling before the full contents inventory comes back. It's a ballpark by design — once the room-by-room inventory is done, price against that and treat this figure as the early estimate it replaced.

Eight boxes per room is a common planning average for a typically furnished residential room, which is why it's the default. Kitchens, dense storage rooms, garages, and collectors' spaces run well above that; sparse bedrooms run below. Adjust the boxes-per-room input to the room mix you actually walked. The box count drives both the material order and the labor hours, so a realistic average matters more than the round number the default suggests.

Twenty minutes per box is a reasonable blended planning rate covering unpacking, cleaning, and repacking of mixed household items. Heavily soot-covered contents, delicate items, and anything needing specialty cleaning run longer; unaffected items that just get wiped and repacked run shorter. Enter the rate that fits the soot load and item mix on your job. This is a planning figure for scheduling and reserves, not a fixed production standard — verify against actual production once the work is underway.

No. It's an early planning estimate for reserves and scheduling before the room-by-room contents inventory exists. A proper contents scope lists items, condition, and cleanable-versus-total-loss calls, and that's what you ultimately price and settle against. Use this calculator to set expectations up front, then replace it with the actual inventory. Treating a rough box estimate as the final number is how contents claims get under-scoped.