Dumpster Rental in Kelim, CO

Roll-off containers for Kelim homes and jobsites

This is our own ground. Our yard is on the Kelim frontage road, out on the I-25 corridor between the Colorado 60 and US 34 interchanges, and Kelim is where this business has run from since 2013.

The first thing to get right about Kelim is the thing almost everybody gets wrong. Kelim is in LARIMER County, not Weld. The mailing address says Johnstown, Johnstown reads as a Weld County town, and the assumption follows — but every source we could reach says Larimer. The Census geocoder, run against Kelim’s coordinates at 40.40665 north, 104.95081 west, returns Larimer County and no incorporated place, meaning the point sits in unincorporated territory. The GNIS listing puts Kelim in Larimer County on the USGS Windsor 7.5-minute quadrangle, at an elevation of 4,938 feet. And Weld County’s own official list of its unincorporated communities does not include Kelim — it lists Barnesville, Briggsdale, Buckingham, Camfield, Carr, Cornish, Dover, Galeton, Gill, Gowanda, Hardin, Hereford, Keota, Kuner, Lucerne, Purcell, Puritan, Roggen, Stoneham, Vollmar and Wattenburg. Gill and Lucerne are on it. Kelim is not, because Kelim is Larimer.

The second thing is that Kelim has no government of its own. It is an unincorporated community: no town council, no clerk, no municipal code, no permit desk, no municipal collection service. That sounds like it should make everything simpler and in one respect it does — there is no town ordinance to check. What it means in practice is that the county and the fire district are the government here, and you need to know which county. For Kelim, that is Larimer County, seat Fort Collins, main line (970) 498-7000, Engineering on (970) 498-5709.

What is actually known about Kelim is short and we are going to keep it that way. It was named for Lee J. Kelim, an early settler. A post office called Kelim was established in 1915 and ran until 1925. That is what the reliable sources say, and it is all we are prepared to say. There is a founding date, a rail-siding story and a film-studio claim circulating about this place, all of it traceable to a single automatically generated page, and none of it is going on our website. If you want colorful local history that is actually sourced, the meteorite that fell at the former townsite of Elwell a few miles south of here on 6 July 1924, during a funeral service with more than two hundred people watching, is a better story and it is documented.

What Kelim is, commercially, is a location marker for the fastest-growing commercial ground in northern Colorado. The 2534 development is about a mile and a half west of the GNIS point; Ledge Rock Center is two hundred acres of retail nearby; Scheels opened at the I-25 and US 34 interchange in 2017; Colorado’s first Buc-ee’s opened at the Colorado 60 interchange in 2024. All of it sits on the Larimer side of Johnstown, which is our doorstep, and it is why we can be at most addresses in the corridor faster than anybody dispatching from a metro yard.

We are not going to tell you whether our yard is inside or outside the Johnstown town limits, because we genuinely do not know. The federal address file does not carry the street name, and adding the ZIP produces two different frontage roads — one inside the town, one not. Both are in Larimer County. We would rather say that than invent an answer we would have to defend later.

What we know about working in Kelim

Because Kelim has no town government, the permit question here has a shorter chain than it does in Johnstown or Windsor. On private property — a driveway, a yard, a farmyard, a parking lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. There is no municipality to license, permit or object. What remains is the county road, the fire district, and whatever covenants or landlord consents attach to your own land.

For a county road, Larimer County Engineering is (970) 498-5709. Larimer issues a Right-of-Way Construction Permit for utilities, an Access or driveway permit, a Special Transport permit, and Private Road, Development Construction and Floodplain Development permits, all quoted at ten business days, with insurance certificates that must match county requirements or add two to three weeks; Risk Management handles those on (970) 498-7361. Here is the limit, stated honestly: none of Larimer’s published permit material addresses placing a container in the right-of-way, in either direction. We will not tell you a permit is required and we will not tell you one is not. Call them. If your job happens to be across the line on unincorporated Weld ground, that is Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000, and their language covers occupation of a county right-of-way without naming dumpsters — broad enough that a call is warranted.

Fire code out here is the structural point that a national competitor will never get right. In unincorporated Weld County, the county enforces no fire code at all — its ordinance says the International Fire Code “shall apply only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under this Building Code” — so the fire protection district is the authority, and district boundaries do not follow municipal boundaries. Front Range Fire Rescue serves Johnstown, Milliken and this part of Weld County on 970-587-4464. Larimer County’s fire-code position we did not establish, so we will not characterize it. Whichever authority you are under, the container rule is the same and it is the one number we work to everywhere: five feet from combustible walls, openings and combustible roof eave lines — 2024 International Fire Code § 304.3.5 at 1.5 cubic yards, § 304.3.4 at 1.0 cubic yard with a noncombustible exception, and every roll-off is far above both.

Disposal from a Kelim address is a Larimer question, and the asymmetry with Weld is the single most useful thing on this page. Neither county collects residential waste. Weld runs two household hazardous waste facilities — Greeley at 1311 North 17th Avenue, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 to 5, and Dacono at 5500 Highway 52, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 9 to 4 — free to Weld County residents, capped at 200 pounds a visit, on (970) 400-2217, with no electronics and no appliances accepted. Weld also runs a seasonal one-ton landfill voucher, one per Weld address. A Kelim household is not a Weld County resident and cannot use any of that free. Your route is Larimer’s: the Central Diversion & Transfer Station, 2388 W. Trilby Road, Fort Collins, Monday to Saturday 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. with the gates closing promptly, on 970-498-5772; the county solid waste line is 970-498-5760 and there is a 24-hour closure hotline on 970-498-5770. The old landfill on South Taft Hill Road is closed to general waste disposal. Whether the Central station takes mixed construction and demolition debris we could not verify, so ask before you load a trailer. Neighbors a mile east genuinely do get a different answer, and they are not wrong — they are just in a different county.

On what can go in a box: electronics have been banned from every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303. Waste tires are refused locally and require state registration to transport ten or more. There is no Colorado yard-waste landfill ban; the landfills here accept yard waste and tree branches, and A-1 Organics composts on 970-454-3492. Beyond the statutory bans, each landfill’s own approved operating plan sets what it refuses, which is why we ask what is going in before we quote a job rather than after.

The ground and the weather here are the last piece. Kelim sits at 4,938 feet on flat, irrigated high plains, not in the foothills — a container truck here runs section-line county roads and a four-lane interstate, not switchbacks. Precipitation at the nearby NOAA stations runs about fifteen inches a year, roughly a third of what the Southeast gets, with snowfall on the order of forty to fifty-six inches because Front Range snow is dry. The average last spring frost is around 12 May, so the outdoor season starts in May rather than March. Both counties publish a 30-inch frost line. Basements are ordinary. Hail runs seven to nine days a year in the most hail-prone corridor in the country, chinook downslope winds have produced Front Range gusts recorded as high as 137 mph, and Weld County has recorded more tornadoes than any other county in the United States — the 2008 Windsor tornado destroyed 78 homes about five and a half miles from here. Watches and warnings come from NWS Denver/Boulder. Tarp your load.

• RegionLarimer County
• Distance from our yardOur own ground — the yard is on the Kelim frontage road
• Main routesthe I-25 frontage roads, which is most of the local work
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

Kelim is where the trucks start, so for anything on this stretch of frontage road the run is measured in minutes rather than miles. That is the practical advantage of the location and it is most obvious on a same-day call: if you ring early and the box is going somewhere in the corridor between the Colorado 60 and US 34 interchanges, we can usually make it work. The placements out here divide into three kinds. Corridor commercial — the retail and light industrial ground along the frontage roads — where the questions are the swing room for the hoist, a surface that will take the point load of the rails under a loaded box, and a spot that does not block a fire lane or a service door. Subdivision residential, where the geometry is generous and the risks are new sod, shallow irrigation mains beside the drive and streets on a base course that has not taken a final asphalt lift. And county acreage, where the lane surface is the entire question and a quarter mile of gravel that carries a pickup all year can rut badly under a loaded truck in a spring thaw. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach, about eleven feet of working width and better than twenty feet of clear overhead. We carry plywood and use it. Call (970) 427-0341.

Routes we run: the I-25 frontage roads, which is most of the local work, US 34 east and west from the interchange, Colorado 60 south to the Milliken side, the Larimer county roads west toward Loveland, the county grid north toward Windsor and Timnath.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Kelim

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. Kelim is not a municipality, and that changes the shape of everything that follows. No town council, no clerk, no municipal code, no permit counter and no municipal collection service, because there is no town. Kelim is an unincorporated community on the Larimer–Weld county line, just outside Johnstown, and it is in Larimer County — not Weld, whatever the mailing address leads people to assume. Weld County’s own official list of its unincorporated communities does not include Kelim. It does include Gill and Lucerne, which is the cleanest proof of the point we know of. What is left is the county, the fire protection district, and whatever attaches to your own land — a shorter chain than a Johnstown or a Greeley address has to work through, and mostly in your favor.

The county here is Larimer County, and out here it is the building department, the zoning counter and the road authority for every address. The road desk is Larimer County Engineering on (970) 498-5709. Because Colorado has no statewide residential building code, the adoption dates matter and they are not the same on both sides of the line: Weld County’s 2024 package takes effect 15 June 2026, Larimer County’s 1 January 2026. If an address near you turns out to sit inside a municipal limit — and around Johnstown and Windsor those lines do wander — that address gets the town’s answers instead of the county’s. We check rather than assume.

Fire code out here needs care rather than a confident answer. Across the line, in unincorporated Weld County, the county enforces no fire code at all — its ordinance says the International Fire Code “shall apply only when adopted by a local fire district and shall not be enforced under this Building Code” — so there the district is the authority. Larimer County’s own position on the fire code we did not establish, and we will not characterize it. Either way the fire protection district is the desk worth asking, and district boundaries do not follow municipal boundaries. Front Range Fire Rescue serves Johnstown and Milliken on 970-587-4464. The other thing to know before you plan anything is that neither Weld nor Larimer County collects residential waste. There is no county truck out here to compare us with. You subscribe privately, you haul it yourself, or you rent a container, and for anything bigger than a cart the third option is usually the only one that works. Then work out who owns the pavement: I-25 and every US and state route belong to CDOT, and the section-line grid and the gravel aprons off it belong to the county. Give us the address and we will tell you which owner you are dealing with before we load a truck.

Now the part most of our competitors skip. With no town in the picture the placement question reduces to two cases, and the first one covers nearly every job out here. On your own property — driveway, yard, farmyard, lot — no right-of-way permit is in play at all. There is no municipality here to license, permit or object. There is no Kelim town permit desk, because there is no town. What remains on private ground is the fire district, your covenants or landlord’s consent, and whether the lane will carry a loaded truck.

The second case is a container that has to sit in a county road or the ditch line, and that is a call to the county before the truck comes rather than after. Larimer County issues right-of-way construction, access, special transport, private road, development construction and floodplain permits, quoted at ten business days, with insurance certificates that have to match county requirements — Risk Management handles those on (970) 498-7361. Here is the limit, stated straight: none of Larimer’s published permit material addresses placing a container in the right-of-way, in either direction. We will not tell you a permit is required and we will not tell you one is not. Call them. If the job is across the line on unincorporated Weld ground, that is Weld County Public Works on (970) 400-4000, and their language covers occupation of a county right-of-way without naming dumpsters — broad enough that a call is warranted. We are not going to tell you flatly that a county road either does or does not need a permit for a container, because we did not find a published county provision that names containers — and “we could not find one” is not the same sentence as “there is none.” Contrast that with the town limits down the road, where Johnstown has written it down: § 7-35, no dumpster on any public property without the Town’s express written authorization, placement in violation “considered a nuisance.” Different government, different paperwork, same truck. Either way, call Colorado 811 before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled.

The driveway carries one rule of its own and it is a fire rule. There is no statewide fire code doing this job in Colorado, so the edition depends on who adopted it, and the one we can name is the 2024 International Fire Code as adopted by the Town of Johnstown. In that edition § 304.3.5 keeps dumpsters and containers of 1.5 cubic yards or more out of buildings and at least five feet from combustible walls, openings and combustible roof eave lines, with no exception; the adjacent § 304.3.4 applies the same five feet from 1.0 cubic yard, with an exception where the container itself is noncombustible. Both sections exist and neither one is “the” threshold, which is where most of the copy on the internet goes wrong — along with a “ten feet from the building” rule of thumb that is nobody’s code at all. It does not matter here anyway: every roll-off we run is many times over both figures, so the answer never changes. Five feet, always, and it is measured from the eave line, not just from the wall. On a Kelim lot with a deep eave and a narrow side yard that is a real measurement, and we take it before the rails come off the truck. Whichever fire authority covers a Kelim address, and which edition it enforces, we did not establish, and we will not characterize it — that authority, rather than the county switchboard, is the desk to ask, and fire district boundaries do not follow municipal boundaries. Front Range Fire Rescue covers Johnstown and Milliken on 970-587-4464.

Last, the approach. To swing a box off the rails we want about 60 feet of straight, roughly 11 feet of working width and 20-plus feet of clear overhead. What fails that test in Kelim is rarely the highway; it is almost always the last hundred feet. This is flat, irrigated high plains rather than mountain country — our own ground out at Kelim sits at 4,938 feet — so a truck here runs a section-line grid and a four-lane interstate instead of switchbacks, and the things that go wrong are different ones. In the newer subdivisions it is fresh sod, a shallow irrigation line beside the drive and a street still on base course without its final asphalt lift. On acreage it is a quarter mile of gravel lane that carries a pickup all year and ruts badly under a loaded truck in a spring thaw. In the older grids it is a low service drop and a mature shade tree over the only flat spot — a gap that looks wide open at eye level can be closed at twenty feet. Walk it, look up, and tell us what you see.

Two more layers reach every job we run, and neither of them starts at a local counter. The first is what may lawfully go in the box. Solid waste in this state is CDPHE’s, under the solid waste regulations at 6 CCR 1007-2, and the structure is not the one people bring with them from the Southeast. A Colorado landfill is authorized by a Certificate of Designation issued by the county under C.R.S. § 30-20-102, with state review — a county instrument, and one that attaches to disposal facilities rather than to haulers. Beyond the statutory bans, what a landfill will take is set facility by facility in its own approved operating plan rather than by a statewide list, which is exactly why we ask what is going in the box before we quote a job instead of after.

The bans themselves are shorter than newcomers expect and they run the opposite way from the Southeast. Colorado has no yard-waste landfill ban. The landfills serving this area accept yard waste and brush, and A-1 Organics composts green material on 970-454-3492 if you would rather route it that way. What is banned outright is electronics, kept out of every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303 — no televisions, monitors or computers in the container. Waste tires are refused at the gate by the local operators, and state rules require registration to transport ten or more, so tires never go in our boxes. Paint, solvents, fuel, automotive fluids, batteries, propane cylinders and pool chemicals stay out as well; those are a household hazardous waste run, not a container load.

Asbestos is the hard stop. We do not accept asbestos in our containers. In Colorado it is an air quality matter rather than a solid waste one, which surprises people: the CDPHE Air Pollution Control Division runs it under Regulation 8, Part B. In a single-family home the trigger is 32 square feet or 50 linear feet — far tighter than the federal commercial numbers — notification runs ten working days, the permit fee is published at $60 to $180, and a demolition requires notification regardless of size. The asbestos line is 720-507-5136. None of that is our filing to make, but all of it sits ahead of the container and we would rather book around it than deliver into a stop-work order.

The other date is 1978, which puts a job under the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule — and here Colorado is the opposite of most states people move from. Colorado is not authorized by EPA to run the RRP program, so a firm working on pre-1978 housing certifies with EPA directly rather than with a state agency. How often that bites depends on where you are standing: in Johnstown, only about one home in ten predates 1980 and the median year built is 2007, so RRP is concentrated in the old core rather than spread across the market. Then, before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled, call Colorado 811 on 811 or 800-922-1987. The statute is C.R.S. Title 9, Article 1.5, and the notice period is two business days, not counting the day of notice. Be aware that Colorado 811’s own homepage says three business days while the statute and the site’s interior pages say two — give yourself the longer of the two and you are safe either way. White-line the dig area first. Setting a box on a driveway does not trigger the call; your project does — footings, fence posts, a stump, a sewer lateral. Our permit and placement guide walks the whole sequence in order.

The ground under Kelim decides most of the rest, and almost every instinct carried in from a wetter market is wrong here. This is irrigated high plains: our own ground at Kelim sits at 4,938 feet, and precipitation across this market runs about 15.34 inches a year on the 1991–2020 normals at Greeley — roughly a third of what the Southeast gets. We are not going to tell you what the soil does underneath, because we did not establish it for this ground and it is not the sort of thing to guess at in print. What we will tell you is how the surface behaves under a truck, because that is what we deal with. A loaded 20 yard box is several tons carried on four small contact points. Dry, this ground takes it. Wet — after an irrigation set, a cloudburst or a spring thaw — it ruts, and a quarter mile of lane that carries a pickup all year will not carry us. So the driveway is the surface and the lawn is not, plywood or timber mats go under every wheel and under both rails on every placement, all year round, and after a wet stretch we would rather move a date than tear up two hundred feet of drive.

The houses match the climate rather than the map. Basements are ordinary here, which changes a cleanout more than it changes a price: stairs mean hand-carrying, and a smaller box parked close to the walkout beats a bigger one parked out of the way. Both counties publish a 30-inch frost line, so footings, water services and sewer laterals sit at least that deep, and a trench that would be shallow somewhere warmer is a real excavation here. Spoil is the densest material that comes off a residential site, which is why a footing repair or a sewer lateral is a 10 yard loaded low conversation rather than a 20 yard one. The season starts later than newcomers plan for as well: the average last spring frost is around 12 May. One adjacent question comes up often enough while a house is open to be worth answering, and we will answer it the way EPA does rather than by naming a number off a map that gave us two different readings: “Homes with elevated levels of radon have been found in all three zones. All homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.”

The vintage of the housing is the part that surprises people who know this corridor only from the interstate, and it cuts the work in two. In Johnstown, whose mailing address our yard uses, the median year built is 2007 and 71.8 percent of the housing went up in 2000 or later; only about one home in ten predates 1980, concentrated in the old Parish Avenue and Main Street core from the sugar and dairy era, where pre-1978 lead paint and older asbestos are live questions. Everywhere else the jobs are new-build cleanup, first remodels and hail roofs. The growth behind that is real and it is fast: Johnstown went from 17,303 people at the 2020 census to 22,433 by the 2025 estimate, a 29.5 percent gain that put it tenth in the nation for growth among places of 20,000 or more in 2024–25, with 528 single-family permits in 2025. Weld County as a whole went from 328,981 to 378,426 over the same five years. Those are Census numbers, and they are why new-construction cleanup is a steady service line here rather than an afterthought.

Then the weather, and here there is one hazard that matters more than all the others put together. Hail is the anchor job. This corridor takes seven to nine hail days a year and is the most hail-prone stretch of the United States. Roof tear-off is what this market buys containers for, and it does not arrive evenly — it arrives in bursts, in the week after a storm, when every roofer in the corridor calls on the same morning. If you have just been hit, call early; that is the honest advice. Wind is the second one. Chinook downslope windstorms come off the mountains hard enough that Front Range gusts have been recorded as high as 137 mph, and the design wind speed in Weld County is 115 mph. An empty container is a sail and a loose tarp is a kite, so we weight what we cover and we would rather set a box against a windbreak than out in the open. Weld County has more recorded tornadoes than any other county in the United States. Watches and warnings for both counties come from NWS Denver/Boulder on 303-494-3210. An open container left uncovered through a heavy storm fills with water and grit, and that is weight you pay us to haul. Tarp it, or ask us for one.

Where all of it ends up is the local detail we like best, because the lawful routes out of a Kelim project close one at a time and none of them close because we say so. Neither county collects residential waste, so there is no county truck to compare us with. A municipal cart, where a town provides one, is a cart on a schedule and is not built for shingles, drywall, cabinets, tile, concrete or framing lumber. Electronics may not go to a Colorado landfill at all. Tires are refused at the gate. And beyond the statutory bans, each landfill’s own approved operating plan decides the rest. The one place the Southeast’s habits genuinely do not transfer is green waste: Colorado has no yard-waste landfill ban, so clean woody debris has more than one lawful route here — the landfills take it, and A-1 Organics composts it on 970-454-3492. Keep it in a load of its own and you keep that choice. Everything else rides to a permitted facility in one of our boxes, which is the argument for a container stated by somebody other than us.

Collection in Kelim is the county’s, and the shortest true description of it is that there is none. Larimer County provides no residential waste collection at all — anywhere, for anyone. There is no municipal program either, because there is no municipality. Out here you subscribe privately, you haul it yourself, or you rent a container. There is a quicker test than reading a boundary map, and it sits at the end of your lane: if nothing comes for your household garbage, you are on unincorporated ground.

What the counties do run is drop-off, and this is where the county you are in stops being trivia and starts costing money. Larimer County collects no residential waste anywhere in the county — and neither does Weld, next door. What exists instead is drop-off: Larimer County runs the Central Diversion & Transfer Station at 2388 W. Trilby Road in Fort Collins, on 970-498-5772. The Weld County facilities a few miles east are free to Weld residents, which you are not, so that route is not yours no matter how much closer it looks on a map. A bathroom, a basement, a barn or a roof tear-off does not fit in any of that — a drop-off station is not a place to take a load of shingles, and a household hazardous waste counter certainly is not. That, in one paragraph, is why a container exists out here. See the Colorado disposal and recycling rules for the detail.

Sizes we deliver to Kelim