The Estate Cleanout Checklist for Northern Colorado

An estate cleanout is not a big junk removal. It is a legal process, a family process and a logistics process happening at the same time, usually on a deadline set by somebody else — a closing date, a lease end, a family member with a flight home on Sunday.

The container is the easy part. The order of operations is what decides whether the job goes well.

This is the checklist we would want if it were our parents’ house, written for a market where the house is likely to have a basement, an outbuilding or two, and possibly a shop with sixty years of accumulation in it.

Before anything leaves the house

Nothing goes in a container until the person with authority to dispose of the property says so. In practice that means the personal representative, executor or trustee, and it means the will has been located and the estate’s status is understood. This is the single most common source of real regret in this work — not sentiment, but a bank statement, a deed, a title or a bearer instrument going out in a box of what looked like junk mail.

Before the first bag is filled, search for and set aside:

• Wills, trusts, deeds, titles, mineral rights documents and lease paperwork. Around here, mineral and royalty paperwork is not a rarity — Weld County produced more than 80 percent of Colorado’s oil and gas in 2024, and a good deal of that land has been in the same families a long time.
• Insurance policies, bank and brokerage statements, tax returns, safe deposit keys.
• Military discharge papers, birth, marriage and death certificates, passports, Social Security cards.
• Photographs, negatives, slides, home movies, letters and family bibles. These are unrecoverable and they are almost always in a closet, not a filing cabinet.
• Cash and valuables hidden in the places people hide them: freezers, mattresses, coat pockets, book spines, the toe of a boot, tape under a drawer.

Open every book, every envelope and every coat before it goes. It is slow. It is also the whole reason to do this carefully.

The four-stream sort

Everything in the house belongs to one of four streams, and deciding which one before you pick an item up is what stops a cleanout from taking three weekends longer than it should.

1. Keep and distribute. Family, beneficiaries, specific bequests.
2. Sell. Estate sale, auction, consignment, online. Decide early, because an estate sale company generally wants the house full, not emptied first.
3. Donate. Furniture, clothing, housewares, tools, books. Call ahead; what a charity will accept changes constantly, and upholstered furniture and mattresses are frequently refused.
4. Dispose. This is the container, and it is smaller than people expect once the first three streams are working properly.

Get the sale and the donation decisions made before the box arrives, not while it is sitting on the drive costing rental days.

What size, and when to bring it

For a whole-house estate cleanout, the 20-yard is the default. Household contents are bulky rather than dense — furniture, mattresses, clothing, boxes, carpet — so volume is usually the binding constraint rather than weight.

The exceptions are worth knowing:

• A house with a full basement and a shop is not a whole-house job, it is a whole-house-plus job. Plan on a 30-yard, or a 20 with a scheduled second pull.
• Paper is the heaviest thing in a house. A lifetime of files, magazines, ledgers and books will reach payload in a small box astonishingly fast. If somebody kept everything, tell us.
• Concrete, tile, brick and dirt from an outbuilding or a torn-out patio never go in with household goods. Separate, smaller, heavy-debris box — see concrete and heavy debris.

On timing: bring the container when the sort is done and the crew is assembled, not on day one. A box on the driveway does not motivate anybody; it just accrues days. Our sizing guide has the arithmetic, and our estate cleanout service page has the practicalities.

What cannot go in the box — the estate version

Estate cleanouts turn up more prohibited material than any other job we run, because a house that has been lived in for forty years has forty years of chemistry in the garage.

Electronics are banned from Colorado landfills. C.R.S. § 25-17-303 has prohibited disposal of an electronic device, or a component of one, in a landfill in this state since 1 July 2013. The landfills serving this area list electronic waste as prohibited. That means the console television, the tube monitor, the stereo, the computers, the printers and the pile of cables in the basement all need a recycler rather than a container. CDPHE maintains a list of electronics recyclers.

Tires are refused. The landfills here will not take them, and Colorado’s waste tire rules require state registration to transport ten or more. The stack of tires behind the shed is a separate errand.

Household hazardous waste goes to a facility, not a box. Paint, stain, thinner, solvents, motor oil, antifreeze, pesticides, herbicides, pool chemicals, lead-acid batteries, fluorescent and mercury bulbs, propane cylinders. Weld County residents have two free facilities:

• 1311 North 17th Avenue, Greeley — Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• 5500 Highway 52, Dacono — Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
• (970) 400-2217. Free to Weld County residents. Limits: 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing in containers over five gallons, no leaking containers, nothing in plastic bags. Electronics and appliances are not accepted there.

Kelim is in Larimer County, which trips people up because the mail says Johnstown. Larimer residents use the Central Diversion and Transfer Station, 2388 W. Trilby Road, Fort Collins, (970) 498-5772. Which county you are in depends on the address, not the mailing city — see our county line guide.

Appliances with refrigerant — refrigerators, freezers, window air conditioners, dehumidifiers — need professional coolant removal before a scrapyard will take them, and Weld County’s hazardous waste facilities do not accept appliances.

Medications go to a pharmacy or law enforcement take-back, never in a container and never down a drain. Firearms and ammunition are not a container item under any circumstances; contact the sheriff’s office covering the address for guidance on transfer or disposal. Medical sharps need a sharps program.

The full picture is in our Colorado disposal rules guide.

Older houses: two questions to settle before demolition

Most estate work here is clearing contents, which raises none of this. The moment it turns into removing built-in cabinetry, flooring, ceilings or walls, two rules apply and they are Colorado rules.

Asbestos, pre-1989. Colorado handles asbestos as an air quality matter under CDPHE’s Air Pollution Control Division, Regulation No. 8, Part B. Single-family trigger levels are 32 square feet, or 50 linear feet on pipes, or the volume equivalent of a 55-gallon drum — far tighter than the commercial numbers most people half-remember. A ten working-day notification is required before work commences for removal above trigger levels or for any demolition activity. Published residential fees run $60 for a notice to $180 for a 30-day permit. An inspection by a certified asbestos building inspector is required first, and buildings built after 12 October 1988 with documentation confirming no asbestos-containing materials are exempt. CDPHE asbestos: 720-507-5136, cdphe.colorado.gov. Asbestos-containing material never goes in a rented container.

Lead paint, pre-1978. The federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule applies to compensated work disturbing painted surfaces in pre-1978 housing. Colorado is not an EPA-authorized RRP state, so firms certify with EPA directly rather than with a state agency — a real difference from many neighboring states. epa.gov.

How much of this market is affected? Less than people assume. Johnstown’s median year built is 2007, 71.8 percent of its housing dates from 2000 or later, and only about one home in ten predates 1980. The older stock is concentrated in the historic Parish Avenue and Main Street core and the equivalent older blocks in neighboring towns. Which is, of course, exactly where a long-held family house is most likely to be.

The outbuildings nobody budgets for

In farm country the house is often the smaller half of the job. A shop, a barn, a machine shed or a pair of grain-era outbuildings can hold more material than every room in the house combined, and it is heavier material: steel, fencing, implement parts, lumber, tires, drums.

Three things to look for before you commit to a container size:

• Drums and tanks. Anything that held fuel, oil or chemical needs identifying before it moves. Do not assume an unlabeled drum is empty.
• Scrap metal. Often worth separating out rather than burying in a mixed load.
• Tires and batteries. Both refused at the landfills serving this area.

And do not solve an outbuilding by burning it out. Open burning is restricted by the local fire protection district here rather than by the county, and Weld County’s own waste program notes that a landowner disposing of waste on their own property must submit a design and operations report to the county and to CDPHE for review and approval first. Front Range Fire Rescue: 970-587-4464.

Placement, when the house is empty and nobody is local

Estate jobs are the ones where nobody is on site at delivery, so the placement conversation has to happen at booking.

On a driveway or a private lot, no right-of-way permit is in play. If the box has to sit on public property inside the Town of Johnstown, § 7-35 is explicit — no person shall place, store or maintain a dumpster on any public property unless expressly authorized in writing by the Town. Town Hall: 970-587-4664. Outside town limits it is whichever county owns the road: Weld Public Works (970) 400-4000, Larimer Engineering (970) 498-5709. Details in the permits guide.

Wherever it goes, it goes five feet clear of combustible walls, openings and roof eave lines — the 2024 International Fire Code as adopted by the Town of Johnstown, § 304.3.5 at 1.5 cubic yards and § 304.3.4 at 1.0 cubic yard with a noncombustible exception. Every roll-off exceeds both. We bring plywood for the wheels; the driveway protection guide covers the rest.

A realistic sequence

1. Confirm authority to dispose. Locate the will and the estate paperwork.
2. Search for documents, photographs and hidden valuables. Room by room, container by container.
3. Decide the sale and donation route before anything is thrown out.
4. Pull the four prohibited streams into separate staging piles: electronics, tires, hazardous waste, refrigerant appliances.
5. Book the container for the day the crew is assembled, with the placement agreed.
6. Work top down and back to front — attic, upper floors, main floor, basement, garage, outbuildings.
7. Load heavy low and even, stay below the rails, cover it.
8. Sweep, photograph the empty house, and hand it to whoever needs it next.

One last practical note

Give yourself more days than the job looks like it needs, and fewer people than you think on the first day. Estate cleanouts slow down for good reasons — somebody finds a letter, somebody needs an hour. A container booked for a realistic window costs less than a rushed weekend that misses a deed.

We have been running containers out of our yard on the Kelim frontage road since 2013, and we have handled a lot of these for families who were not in the state. Tell us the address, the square footage and whether there is a basement, a shop or both, and we will tell you the box and the schedule. Call HJP Dumpster Rental at (970) 427-0341. Junk removal · sizes · service areas · FAQ.