The Front Range Garage Cleanout Checklist

Keep, donate, recycle, haul. Four piles, decided as you pick each thing up and not revisited. The trap is a fifth pile — "maybe" — which is how the garage got this way.

Start at the farthest corner and work toward the door, not the reverse. Otherwise you'll move the same box three times and quit at the point where the job gets heavy.

Front Range garages produce the same cast of characters: half-used paint cans, propane cylinders, lawn chemicals and fertilizer, old gas cans, a dead snowblower beside a dead lawnmower, bikes nobody rides, treadmills that became coat racks, and a stack of lumber from a project finished in 2016.

Paint, chemicals, propane and fuel are household hazardous waste. They can't go in the trash, the recycling bin or the back of a hauler's truck, and every county runs its own drop-off days for them. Look up your county's household hazardous waste program — Boulder, Weld, Adams, Jefferson and Broomfield each handle it differently — and take that load yourself.

Bulky-item pickup rules vary by city and usually come with item limits, size limits and a scheduled date that might be weeks out. Items still have to reach the curb, which is the part that stops most people with a treadmill or a water heater.

Tires, batteries, electronics and anything with refrigerant aren't normal curbside material anywhere in the metro. Appliances like fridges and freezers need the refrigerant recovered, and TVs and monitors belong with an e-waste recycler.

Shelves, pegboard and workbenches hold the small stuff, and small stuff takes the longest. Pull everything off, decide it in one pass, then wipe the shelf and decide whether the shelf itself stays. Old shelving and broken plastic bins are haul items.

Sweep out the corners and look at the floor. Oil stains, cracked slabs and rodent evidence are worth knowing about before you rebuild the garage's organization system on top of them.

The most common failure is a pile in the driveway that sits there for three weeks because renting a truck, finding a landfill that takes everything and recruiting a friend all turned out to be harder than expected. Meanwhile the HOA sends a letter.

A crew that quotes from photos and takes the whole load in one visit removes that step entirely. Text pictures of the pile — including the corner nobody wants to touch — and you'll get a firm number, then a pickup window. We carry from the back of the garage, load it, sweep up and take it away, and the usable items go to donation before anything reaches the landfill.