What a garage cleanout costs in Denver

The short answer

Garage cleanouts price by volume, because nobody can list the contents of a garage. A Small Junk Pile is $82, a Medium Junk Pile is $129, a Large Junk Pile is $208. Past that the truck ladder takes over: a quarter truck is $241, a half is $431, three-quarters is $587, a full truck is $732.

The Denver-specific answer: a one-car detached garage in an alley neighborhood is usually a half truck, because it is small but it is completely full. A suburban three-car bay is usually more, because the volume is there even though it looks tidier.

Two completely different garages

Denver has two garage types and they fail in opposite ways.

The detached alley garage. Behind bungalows in Park Hill, Congress Park, Berkeley, Platt Park and Baker. Built for a car the size of a Model A, never expanded, reached off a service lane. It fills to the ceiling and then the car lives on the street permanently. Access is the constraint: the truck works from the alley, which is fine in September and a genuine problem in February once the plows have pushed a berm across the alley mouth and the gravel has frozen into ruts.

The attached three-car. Highlands Ranch, Centennial, Parker, Aurora's newer eastern subdivisions, Broomfield, Erie. Enormous, well lit, with a wall of steel shelving and an overhead rack. Nobody thinks of it as a junk problem because everything is on a shelf. Then you count: two bikes, a rack of skis, a snowboard, a roof box, eight camping totes, four paint cans, a dead treadmill and a set of takeoff tires.

What Denver garages are actually full of

Gear. That is the honest answer, and it is the thing that makes a Front Range garage different from a garage anywhere flat. People move here for the mountains, buy the gear for six different sports across their first four years, and then discover which two they actually do.

Common Denver combinations: the mower and the snow blower that both stopped working is $65 + $71 = $136. The shelving wall and the workbench is $71 + $100 = $171. A commuter bike and the e-bike that replaced it is $37 + $56 = $93.

The October deadline

There is a real seasonal rhythm to this in Denver, and it is not spring cleaning. It is the last two or three weekends before the first serious snow, when a household realizes the car has to fit in the garage this winter or it is scraping ice at 6:40 every morning for five months.

That makes late September and October the busiest garage-cleanout window of the year on the Front Range. The second busiest is early summer, when the bikes come out and the winter gear has to go somewhere.

Our price does not move with the calendar — there is no peak rate and no seasonal surcharge — but the calendar itself gets tight. If you want a Saturday in October, book it a couple of weeks out. A weekday in November is trivially easy and costs exactly the same.

Hail leaves its wreckage in the garage

Front Range hail season does a specific thing to garages. After a bad storm rolls across Aurora, Centennial or Lakewood, the shredded patio set, the punctured umbrella, the cracked planters and the bent screens do not go out with the trash — they get stacked in the garage to deal with later, alongside whatever the roofer left. Later arrives two storms after that.

Those items are priced individually: a Patio Chair (Each) is $30, a Patio Table is $89, a Patio Umbrella + Base is $53, a Planter / Large Pot is $45, and Roofing Shingles (per bundle) is $48. A wrecked patio set, table and one chair, is $89 + $30 = $119.

Three things that slow a garage job down

• Paint. Denver garages accumulate it — every interior repaint, every deck stain, every touch-up can from a previous owner. It is handled as its own line rather than thrown on the pile: $30 a gallon can, $52 a five-gallon bucket.
• Tires. Winter takeoffs live on the garage floor for years after the car is gone. A single tire is $22 and a set of four is $87.
• Alley access in winter. If your garage is detached and the alley is unplowed, say so when you book. We can work from the front and carry, or we can schedule after a thaw. Either way it is better known in advance than discovered by a truck.

How to get an accurate number in five minutes

Stand at the garage door and take four photographs: straight in, both side walls, and the ceiling rack. Send them. That is enough for a real quote on nine garages out of ten, because the volume estimate is what matters and the photographs show it better than a description does.

Then flag the outliers separately — the treadmill, the riding mower, the hot tub that was disconnected and pushed into the bay, the gun safe. Those are named items with published prices, and naming them up front is what keeps the quote from moving.

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