Clearing an Acreage Property or Barn in Parker and Elbert County

Most cleanouts inside Parker town limits look the same: a garage, a basement, a deck off the back of a 1998 tract house. Drive fifteen minutes east on Hilltop or south past Franktown and the job changes completely. Out there the parcels run five, ten, thirty-five acres, half of them bought in the eighties by somebody who kept two horses and a tractor, and the barn has been filling up ever since. Nobody writes about those cleanouts. This is that article.

I have been hauling in Douglas County since 2014, and acreage work punishes guesswork harder than anything else we do. Wrong container, wrong spot, wrong material mix, and you have a truck sitting on soft ground at the bottom of a quarter-mile gravel drive.

Who this is for

If your address is unincorporated Douglas or Elbert County, or you are out toward Elizabeth, Kiowa, Franktown, the eastern fringe of the Pinery, or the wooded ground around Larkspur and Perry Park, this applies to you. Common triggers: a sale after thirty years of ownership, an estate where the parents kept horses and the kids do not, a barn that finally has to come down, a new owner facing four outbuildings and a burn pile. We run all of it out of our Parker yard — check our service areas page if you are unsure about your road.

What actually comes out of a barn

People tell me "just a little cleanup in the barn" and then I show up. What comes out of a working or formerly working barn, near enough every time:

• Rotted stall boards, kickboards and chewed-up 2x8 planking
• Broken stall mats — heavy rubber, and the single most underestimated item on this list
• Rusted corral panels, bent gates, T-posts, and rolled barbed or field wire that has been leaning in a corner since the Clinton administration
• Loafing shed roofing and siding, usually corrugated steel with the fasteners still in it
• Hay twine and net wrap by the trash-bag load
• Broken tack, saddle racks, dry-rotted leather, cracked buckets
• Feed bins, cracked poly water tanks, mineral tubs
• Old implements, a three-point attachment nobody can identify, and loose scrap steel

That mix is why a barn cleanout is not a normal junk-hauling call. It is dense, awkward, and it needs sorting before any of it goes anywhere.

Three streams, sorted before anything gets loaded

Sort on the ground first. It costs you an afternoon and saves real money.

1. Scrap steel

Panels, gates, T-posts, roofing tin, implements, wire, old water heaters, the axle out of a trailer that died in 1991. Steel has value at a scrap yard, and there are buyers within an easy pull of Parker. Burying half a ton of steel in a roll-off is paying to throw away money twice — once at the gate and once in the check you never cashed. Pull a separate pile for metal near the drive where a flatbed or a trailer can get to it.

2. Clean untreated wood

Stall boards, unpainted framing, pallets, siding with no treatment or paint. If you are generating enough of it, some of this can be handled as clean wood rather than mixed trash. Keep it out of the brush pile though — dimensional lumber and slash are not the same stream. Our yard waste removal page covers what qualifies as clean organic material.

3. Everything else

Insulation, tack, plastics, tarps, twine, shingles, drywall from a converted tack room, general debris. That is your roll-off load, and it is the one we price. See the Douglas County disposal rules guide for the full accepted list.

Manure and bedding: we cannot take it

This is the conversation I have most often on acreage, so I will be blunt. Manure, soiled shavings and wet bedding do not go in our containers. Landfills in this region do not want it in a mixed load, it is enormously heavy once it is wet, and it will sour a container so badly that the next customer notices.

Your options are the ones horse people already know: compost it on site in a managed pile, land-apply it on your own ground at agronomic rates, or call a dedicated manure hauler — several of them work the Franktown and Elizabeth corridor and charge less per ton than any landfill will. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment publishes guidance on agricultural waste and composting at cdphe.colorado.gov.

One practical note: if manure gets mixed into a roll-off, the whole load can be refused at the gate. That means the container comes back to your property full, and you pay for the trip either way. Keep the muck fork away from the can.

Treated posts, railroad ties and creosote: hard no

Creosote railroad ties, penta-treated fence posts and old utility poles are a hard no, and it is not a preference — the facilities we use will not accept treated wood in mixed debris. Ties are everywhere on acreage out here; people used them for retaining walls, arena borders and round pen posts for forty years. They go to a site that specifically handles treated wood. Ask us and we will tell you where. Do not slide them in under a load of stall boards hoping nobody looks. Somebody always looks.

The material table

The weight traps

Every acreage job has at least one of these, and they are what blows a budget. Stall mats first: a single 4x6 mat runs 90 to 110 pounds, and a twelve-stall barn can hide two tons of rubber. Wet bedding, arena footing sand, dirt from a leveled pad, an old concrete slab, and the buried footings under a round pen are all the same problem — small volume, enormous weight.

The rule out here is simple. Dense material goes in a 10 yard, and nothing else goes in with it. A 10 yard sits low, loads by wheelbarrow, and hits the legal weight limit long before it looks full. Light bulky barn debris goes in a 20 or a 30 yard. Mixing them is how you end up with a container you cannot legally move. If you are not sure which way your pile leans, our size guide walks through it, or just call and describe the barn.

Getting a truck to your barn

This is where acreage differs most from town work. A loaded roll-off truck is 30-plus tons, and it does not float.

• Gravel drives. Long drives rut badly after snowmelt and after a hard August storm. If your drive is soft, we would rather come Monday morning when the ground is frozen or dry than tear a track down it.
• Ranch gates and cattle guards. Measure your gate opening. A truck needs 12 feet clear and a straight approach — it cannot pivot through a 10-foot gate on an angle. Tell us about cattle guards; some old ones will not carry the axle load.
• Septic and well. Mark your tank, your leach field and your well head with flags before delivery day. A leach field will not survive a loaded truck. If you do not know where yours is, county records usually have the permit drawing.
• Set it at the barn, not the house. The whole point is that you are not hauling stall boards 300 yards. We need a firm, reasonably level spot with about 60 feet of straight backing room and no low branches or power lines overhead.

We put protection boards down as standard on every delivery — that matters more on a gravel apron or a concrete barn pad than most people expect. There is more on that in our driveway protection guide.

Burn piles, fire bans and mitigation slash

The traditional acreage answer to all of this is a burn pile behind the shed. That plan is less reliable every year. Both Douglas County and Elbert County require open-burn permits with weather conditions attached, and Stage 1 and Stage 2 fire restrictions shut the window for weeks at a stretch — often exactly the weeks in spring and fall when you actually have time to work. A container is boring, but it is available on the day you scheduled it.

Defensible-space work up in the wooded corridor around Larkspur, Perry Park and the western Pinery is its own stream. Slash — limbs, small-diameter stems, brush — is a clean organic load and should never be mixed with barn trash. Keep it separate for a yard waste container or take it to a county slash-collection event. Colorado State Forest Service has the current defensible-space standards, and they are worth reading before you cut.

Sequencing a multi-day clear

Do not order one container and hope. A thirty-five-acre place with a barn, two loafing sheds and a machine shed is a three- or four-container job, run in sequence with next-day swaps:

1. Container one — bulk barn debris. 30 yard. Stall boards, tack, plastics, twine, general trash. This is the fast one; it fills in a day and a half.
2. Container two — structure. 30 or 40 yard if you are taking down a shed. See demolition debris for what changes when a building comes down.
3. Container three — the heavy. 10 yard for mats, footing sand, concrete and footings.
4. Scrap and slash stay in their own piles on the ground the whole time and leave separately.

Book the swaps up front. Next-day swaps are standard for us, but on a Saturday in June the calendar is real. If a container fills faster than you planned, same-day service is often available — just call early.

Hazardous items you will find out there

Old ag properties collect chemicals. Expect to turn up half-full jugs of pesticide or herbicide, sometimes products that have not been legal for thirty years, plus used motor oil, tractor batteries, 20-pound and 100-pound propane cylinders, and a fence line of old tires used as feeder weights.

None of it goes in a container. Ag chemicals go to a collection event or a program run through the state; used oil and batteries go back to an auto parts store; propane goes to a dealer who can purge the cylinder; tires go to a tire recycler by the piece. Our Douglas County recycling and disposal guide lists the local drop points. If you find something unlabeled, leave it sealed and ask.

Get a plan before you start pulling boards

These jobs go well when somebody thinks about them for twenty minutes before the first stall board comes off the wall. Tell us the road, the gate width, where the septic sits and roughly what is in the barn, and we will tell you which containers to run and in what order — flat rate, protection boards down. Call Dane and the crew at DNV Dumpster Rental Parker at (720) 674-7845, or send details through our contact page and we will get a swap schedule on the calendar.