That basement has been waiting for a decision
If you own one of the older homes around Springfield, especially something built before the 1970s off Grand, in Rountree, or out toward Galloway, you probably have a basement that has slowly turned into storage nobody plans for. Boxes from a move that happened years ago. Paint cans that dried out a decade ago. Furniture waiting for a purpose it will never get. You go down there for the water heater or the breaker box and you leave without touching anything else, because the scale of it is discouraging.
That hesitation is normal. Basement clear-outs in this part of Missouri come with a few wrinkles that a closet or garage cleanout doesn't have, mostly because of what our clay soil and weather do to below-grade spaces over the decades.
Check for moisture before you touch a single box
Springfield sits on karst limestone with plenty of clay soil that swells when it's wet and shrinks when it's dry. That movement stresses old foundation walls, and a lot of basements built forty or fifty years ago were never properly waterproofed to begin with. Before you start hauling things out, walk the perimeter and look for water lines on the walls, white mineral staining, or a musty smell that's stronger in one corner than another.
If boxes near an outside wall are soft, warped, or stuck to the floor, treat that as information, not just a mess. It usually means water has been getting in during heavy spring rain or the sudden thaw-freeze cycles we get in February and March. You can still clear it out yourself, but wear gloves and a mask, and don't assume everything under a damp box is fine. Mold likes cardboard and old fabric, and it spreads quietly in a space that doesn't get much airflow.
More on this from Planning A Basement Clear-Out In An Older Home.
Sort by what the house has been doing to it, not just by category
Old paint, solvents, and pesticides show up constantly in Springfield basements because a lot of these houses have had the same owners' worth of garden and hobby supplies stacked in a corner since the Carter administration. These can't go in a regular dumpster. Check with the city or county on household hazardous waste drop-off before your clear-out day, and set that stuff aside first so it doesn't end up mixed in with everything else.
Old furnaces, water heaters, and any galvanized or cast iron plumbing you find down there are common in homes from this era, and they're heavy in a way that surprises people. If you're replacing an old coal-converted furnace or hauling out cast iron radiators, get a second person and a dolly, or plan on paying someone to move it. This is also where people hurt their backs, so don't be a hero about the last hundred pounds.
Think about timing and what the ground is doing outside
If you're renting a dumpster to help with the clear-out, pay attention to the season. Late winter and early spring in the Ozarks bring heavy rain and soft ground, and a loaded dumpster sitting on a wet driveway or yard for a week can leave ruts or crack older concrete that's already stressed by freeze-thaw cycles. Summer clear-outs come with their own problem: a hot, closed-up basement with no cross ventilation gets miserable fast, and mold spores kick up more dust and odor once they're disturbed by moving boxes.
A dry stretch in fall, after the worst of the humidity but before the ground freezes, tends to be the easier window for this kind of project in our area. It's not a rule, just a pattern worth knowing before you commit a weekend to it.
Where this stops being a weekend job
A basement clear-out is a reasonable homeowner project right up until you find something structural. Cracks in the foundation wall wider than a pencil, a floor that's visibly sloping, wood framing that crumbles when you press it, or a support post that's rusted through at the base are not things to push past on your way to the dumpster. Those need a foundation contractor or structural engineer, not a trash bag.
Same goes for anything that looks like old asbestos insulation on pipes, which shows up in houses built through the 1970s. It's usually gray, papery, and wrapped around ductwork or water lines. Leave it alone and get it assessed rather than bagging it yourself. Everything else, the boxes, the broken furniture, the decades of accumulated stuff, is squarely in the range of a project you can tackle over a weekend with some help and a plan for where it's all going to go.