Dumpster Rental in Monroe Avenue, CO

Roll-off containers for Monroe Avenue homes and jobsites

The Monroe Avenue Historic District was Greeley’s first, designated by the City on 13 December 1999, three years before downtown. The City publishes its boundary as “9th Ave. from 11th St. to 16th St., roughly.”

Notice the mismatch and do not let it throw you: the district is named Monroe Avenue and its published boundary runs along 9th Avenue. Both come from the City’s own historic register, and we publish it the way the City writes it rather than trying to reconcile the naming. If you are working on a house in those blocks and you are not sure whether it is designated, the City is the only body that can tell you, and the number is Greeley 311, (970) 351-5311. The district also has a resident champion: Historic Greeley Inc., a preservation nonprofit, is headquartered in the district in the Southard-Gillespie House, on (970) 302-8368 — you can find them at historicgreeley.org.

What matters commercially is what a historic district means about the buildings. It means old, and old in Greeley is not a rounding error. The median Greeley home was built in 1985, roughly 46 percent of the city’s housing stock predates 1980, and 7.2 percent was built in 1939 or earlier. The Monroe Avenue blocks sit at the old end of that. So on almost any job here, two rules are live before a single sheet of drywall comes down: the federal lead renovation rule for anything built before 1978, and Colorado’s asbestos regulation for anything built before 12 October 1988. That is not a footnote on this street. It is the first conversation.

The jobs themselves are the ones old houses generate. Kitchens and bathrooms on their second or third refit. Plaster and lath coming out. Knob-and-tube and old wiring chased through walls. Basements being finished, unfinished and finished again. Detached garages on the alley line being torn down or rebuilt. Porches, storm windows, cedar shingle and asbestos-cement siding. Estate work, because houses in a district like this change hands after a long tenure and come with sixty years of contents — see estate cleanouts. And roofs, because northeastern Colorado runs seven to nine hail days a year inside the most hail-prone corridor in the country, and a house of this age is very likely on its third or fourth covering.

The practical difference between working here and working out in the newer western half of the city is the last hundred feet. These lots are narrow, the drives were cut for a smaller car, the trees are older than the trucks, and the alley is usually the right answer. That is all workable. It just wants describing before the truck is loaded rather than discovering on the day.

What we know about working in Monroe Avenue

Inside the Greeley city limits the City is the government for every question a container raises, and it has written the answers down by section. § 8-368 requires a license of “all refuse haulers who collect, transport or remove refuse, garbage or ashes within the city”, and § 8-371 makes the City “the sole agency for the collection and disposal of refuse” acting through “city-licensed operators.” Greeley does not run the trucks; it licenses the people who do. That is the rule; we say nothing about our own standing under it in either direction, and we would rather you asked us on the phone than read a claim on a web page.

On your own driveway, yard or alley-side parking pad, no Public Space permit is in play at all. That is nearly every set in this district. In the street it is different, and the City’s own permitting guidance is explicit: “Placement of dumpsters within the Public Space and roadways requires Public Space Traffic permits and proper signage.” The desk is Public Works Permits, 970-350-9881, 2835 W. 10th Street. On these narrow blocks that matters more than it does out west, because a container in the parking lane on a 9th Avenue block is a real mobility question and the City treats it as one. Do not lean on § 12-269(a), the provision that lets household “trash, garbage or refuse containers for pick-up” sit on the right-of-way “for one 24-hour period within a seven-day period”; that is the weekly bin rule and it is not a roll-off permission.

Fire separation is five feet from a combustible wall, and here it bites more often than people expect. Greeley adopted the 2021 International Fire Code at § 22-454, effective 1 January 2023, and made no amendment to Section 304, so the model provision applies unmodified: a dumpster shall not be stored inside a building or placed within five feet of a combustible wall. On a narrow lot with a wood-sided house on one side and a wood-framed detached garage on the other, five feet from both can be the whole width of the drive. That is a conversation to have when you book, not when the rails come off. Greeley Fire Prevention, (970) 350-9510, will answer a specific placement question, and the Greeley Fire Department runs seven stations in the city.

Now the two rules that really define this district. Lead: the pre-1978 renovation, repair and painting rule is federal, and Colorado is not an EPA-authorized state for it — firms certify with the EPA directly rather than with a state program. It is triggered by compensated renovation that disturbs painted surfaces in pre-1978 housing or child-occupied facilities. In a district designated for its historic housing, assume it applies until somebody establishes otherwise. Asbestos: in Colorado this is an air-quality matter, handled by CDPHE under Regulation 8, Part B. For a single-family dwelling the trigger levels are 32 square feet, 50 linear feet or the volume of a 55-gallon drum; removal above the trigger, and any demolition, needs 10 working days’ notice; the notice fee is $60 and the single-family permit $180; and buildings built after 12 October 1988 are exempt, which no house in this district is. The number is 720-507-5136. Neither of those is a container question, but both change what goes in the container and when, and a surprise on day two costs more than a phone call on day zero. The full guide is here.

Two housekeeping notes. Paint, solvent, thinner, old pesticide, pool chemicals and automotive fluid cannot go in the container — and there is a free route for them: Weld County’s household hazardous waste facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley, free to every Weld County resident, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday 8 to 5, on (970) 400-2217, capped at 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing over five gallons, nothing leaking and nothing in plastic bags. Electronics and appliances are not accepted there, and electronics have been banned from Colorado landfills since 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303, so they need a dedicated recycler. And if the property is designated or you think it might be, ask the City what exterior work or demolition requires before you start. We could not verify Greeley’s design-review trigger and will not invent one — 311 on (970) 351-5311.

• RegionWeld County
• Distance from our yardJust west and south of downtown, a short run from the yard on 14th Avenue
• Main routes9th Avenue north and south, which is the spine of the district as the City draws it
• Typical deliverySame or next day

Getting a truck to you

We come at this district on 9th Avenue or in off the numbered streets from downtown, and the run itself is nothing. The placement is the whole job. Lots along here are narrow, the front drives were cut for a 1940s car, and there are mature trees over most of the street line, so the first thing we ask about is overhead clearance rather than width. A 20-yard container wants roughly sixty feet of straight approach, about eleven feet of working width and better than twenty feet of clear air overhead so the hoist can stand the box up as it comes off the rails; a 15 forgives a tight lot considerably more, and on this street that is often the right trade even when the volume argues for a 20. The alley is frequently the better set — firmer surface, no street permit, no parked cars — but alley aprons here are old concrete or patched asphalt and we lay plywood under the wheels as standard. Watch for the low service drop to a detached garage and for a wood garage wall on the opposite side of the drive, because five feet from each of two combustible walls can eat the whole opening. In winter, snow and ice on an old sloped drive change where a loaded box can safely be picked up from, so tell us the grade. Send a photo of the drive and the alley and we will tell you honestly which one to use. (970) 888-6911.

Routes we run: 9th Avenue north and south, which is the spine of the district as the City draws it, 11th Street and 16th Street at either end of the published boundary, 10th Avenue and 8th Avenue for the blocks either side, the rear alleys, which carry most of the container work here, the numbered streets east into downtown Greeley.

Landmarks and neighborhoods we work around

Permits, streets and placement in Monroe Avenue

Start with the question that decides everything else: which government are you standing in. In Monroe Avenue that question has a short answer, and it is the best news on this page. You are inside the Greeley city limits, and in Greeley somebody is in charge. Monroe Avenue is a City-designated historic district inside the Greeley city limits — Greeley’s first, designated 13 December 1999, published by the City with the boundary “9th Ave. from 11th St. to 16th St., roughly.” The district is named for Monroe Avenue and its published boundary runs along 9th Avenue; both come from the City’s own register and we publish it the way the City writes it rather than trying to reconcile the naming. That matters because a district is not a government — it has no council, no clerk and no code of its own. The government here is the City of Greeley, a home rule city under Article XX of the Colorado Constitution, and unlike a great many places, it has written down what it wants.

Three things follow, and each of them has a section number. First, Greeley does not run the trash trucks. It licenses the people who do. Greeley Municipal Code § 8-368 provides that “all refuse haulers who collect, transport or remove refuse, garbage or ashes within the city shall be required to have a license,” and § 8-371 makes the City “the sole agency for the collection and disposal of refuse” acting “by and through its duly authorized agents, employees, contractors or city-licensed operators.” That is a real regime and it applies to everyone working inside these city limits. We describe the rule and say nothing whatever about our own standing under it in either direction — ask us on the phone and you will get a proper answer. Second, the City adopts its own codes: the 2021 International Fire Code at § 22-454, the 2021 International Building Code at § 22-31 and the 2021 International Residential Code at § 22-76, all effective 1 January 2023, with a published 30-inch frost line in Table R301.2(1) of the residential code it adopted. Colorado has no statewide building code, so every jurisdiction adopts separately — and Greeley adopted. Third, the City runs its own fire department, seven stations of it, with a Fire Prevention Bureau on (970) 350-9510. You can read the code yourself at the Greeley municipal code.

And there is one number for the rest of it: Greeley 311, (970) 351-5311. That is the difference this site is built on. In Monroe Avenue you are not hunting for a desk; you are choosing between two you can name. Underneath the City sits the county, and here the county is a short walk away. Greeley is the county seat, and that is not a ceremonial fact. Weld County administration, the county building department and the county right-of-way permit desk are all at 1150 O Street in Greeley on (970) 400-4000, with Planning and Development Services on (970) 400-6100. Weld County is 3,984.94 square miles and 378,426 people, and every county permit counter that touches a construction job anywhere in it is here. A contractor working out at Briggsdale or Keenesburg sorts the paperwork in Greeley. None of that county machinery governs a job inside the city limits — for a Monroe Avenue address the City is the answer — but it is worth knowing where it is, because the moment a job moves outside the line, O Street is where it goes. Give us the address and we will tell you which side of that line you are on before we load a truck.

Now the part most of our competitors skip, and in Monroe Avenue it is unusually easy to state because the City states it. Begin with the line that is safe everywhere: on private property — a driveway, a yard, a parking lot — no Public Space permit is in play at all. None. That covers the overwhelming majority of what we set in Monroe Avenue. What can still apply on private ground is your covenants, a landlord’s consent, and the fire code — and only one of those three comes with a number attached to it.

What needs a phone call is the street case, and here the City answered the question itself, in writing, before anybody asked. The City’s published permitting guidance names dumpsters directly: “Placement of dumpsters within the Public Space and roadways requires Public Space Traffic permits and proper signage.” That is the City’s sentence, not our summary of it, and note that it covers the signage as well as the permit. The desk is Greeley Public Works Permits on 970-350-9881, at 2835 W. 10th Street. We do not publish a fee for it, because the City sets its fees on an annual schedule we could not retrieve — call and ask, and give it a few days rather than phoning on the morning of delivery. One provision people find for themselves and misread: § 12-269(a) permits trash and refuse containers on the public right-of-way “for one 24-hour period within a seven-day period.” That is the weekly curbside rule for a household cart. It is not a 24-hour pass for a roll-off in a parking lane. The subsection after it, § 12-269(b), requires that debris from demolition and repair work be removed, which is the other half of the same idea. Whether or not a permit is involved, call Colorado 811 before anything is dug, trenched, driven or pulled. Our Greeley permit and placement guide walks the whole sequence in order.

One rule belongs to the driveway itself, and it is a fire rule. Section 304.3 of the International Fire Code provides that a dumpster must not be stored inside a building and must not be placed within five feet of a combustible wall. There is a threshold in that section expressed in cubic yards, and it does not matter here: every roll-off we run is far over it — even a 10 yard is ten cubic yards — so the five-foot rule applies to all of them, always. The debate you will find on the internet about which subsection and which capacity is academic; say five feet and stop. Measure it from the nearest combustible surface rather than from the wall plane, because on a Monroe Avenue lot with a deep eave and a narrow side yard the eave line is what actually decides where the box can sit, and we take that measurement before the rails come off the truck. Two more rules from the same section are worth having on a working site: containers over forty gallons need lids, and materials liable to spontaneous ignition — oily rags, stain and sealant-soaked cloths — belong in a listed disposal container rather than loose in a roll-off. That is a real jobsite fire cause, not a paper rule. Inside the city limits that question has a desk and a number. Greeley Fire Prevention Bureau, (970) 350-9510 — a bureau of the City’s own seven-station fire department, working to the 2021 International Fire Code the City adopted at § 22-454. Greeley makes no amendment to Section 304, so the model rule applies exactly as written.

Last, the run in. Getting a box off the rails cleanly wants roughly 60 feet of straight, about 11 feet of width and 20-plus feet of nothing overhead. In Monroe Avenue what fails that test is hardly ever the road. It is the final hundred feet of it. Nothing in this county is mountain driving — Greeley stands at 4,676 feet where the Cache la Poudre joins the South Platte, and a truck works a numbered grid in town and a section-line grid outside it — so the obstacles are small, local and entirely predictable once somebody has looked. On the old platted blocks: a service drop slung low over the only way in, a shade tree that has had sixty years to spread, a lot too narrow to swing on, an alley wanting the carts moved and the gate unlocked before we arrive. On the newer western ground: turf laid last month, an irrigation line run shallow alongside the drive, a street sitting on base course and waiting for its top lift. Out on acreage: a quarter mile of lane that has carried a pickup all winter and will cut up under nine tons in April. Walk it, look up, and tell us what you found.

Two questions follow the load rather than the address, and neither is settled at a town hall. The first is what the box is allowed to carry. CDPHE writes the solid waste rules at 6 CCR 1007-2, but the instrument that lets a disposal site exist at all is a county one: a certificate of designation under C.R.S. § 30-20-102, issued by the governing body with jurisdiction and reviewed by the state. Here that governing body is Weld, and the building it works out of is 1150 O Street in Greeley. Past a short list of statutory bans there is no master schedule of refused materials in this state — every facility writes its own into an approved operating plan. Which is why we ask what is going in the box while we are quoting it, rather than finding out when the ticket comes back.

The bans are brief and two of them trip people up. Electronics have been shut out of every Colorado landfill since 1 July 2013 under C.R.S. § 25-17-303, so a television, a monitor or a tower needs a recycler — and the county hazardous waste counter will not take them either, which is the surprise we field most often. Waste tires are refused at the gate, and moving ten or more of them takes a state registration, so they never travel with us. Green material runs the opposite way: Colorado has never put a statewide landfill ban on yard waste, and the gates serving this county list branches and vegetation among what they accept. We still keep it in its own load, for money rather than law. The City’s GROW Center on 970-673-3718 takes grass, leaves, plants, limbs, branches and untreated lumber, though anything painted, stained or nailed together stopped being clean wood the day it went up, and A-1 Organics composts at Eaton on 970-454-3492. Everything wet or reactive — paint, solvent, fuel, automotive fluid, a battery, a propane cylinder, pool chemicals — has somewhere free to go three days a week at 1311 North 17th Avenue here in Greeley, on (970) 400-2217.

Asbestos is where we stop, and there is no version of the job where we do not. Nothing containing it rides in one of our containers. Colorado files it under air quality rather than waste, which catches out anyone who has worked in another state: the CDPHE Air Pollution Control Division administers it under Regulation 8, Part B. On a single-family house the thresholds are 50 linear feet of pipe covering, 32 square feet of anything else, or a 55-gallon drum by volume; a certified inspector goes in first; the notice period is ten working days; the published fees are $60 for a notice and $180 for a thirty-day permit; and a demolition has to be notified whatever the quantity turns out to be. Anything built after 12 October 1988 is exempt where the documentation shows no asbestos-containing material was used. The line is 720-507-5136. None of that is ours to file — but every bit of it sits in front of the container, and a job halted by an inspector costs a great deal more than a week of waiting for one.

The other year to know is 1978, the cut-off for the federal Renovation, Repair and Painting rule, and Colorado handles it backwards compared with most of the country: the state never took the program over, so a firm working on pre-1978 housing certifies with EPA itself. Whether that matters at all depends on where you are standing, and standing here it matters constantly, because close to half of Greeley predates the rule. The median house went up in 1985, roughly 46 percent of the stock is older than 1980, and 7.2 percent of it was already standing in 1939. That is the reason our guide to lead and asbestos in older Greeley homes sits on the front page of this site instead of at the bottom of it. One last item, and it is the one people skip. Ring Colorado 811 on 811 or 800-922-1987 before a shovel goes anywhere. C.R.S. § 9-1.5-103 puts the notice at two business days, not counting the day you give it; Colorado 811 asks for three; take the three and you cannot be caught short. Mark the dig in white before you call. Setting a box on a driveway triggers none of this. A footing, a fence line, a stump or a sewer lateral triggers all of it.

What the box stands on settles more arguments in Monroe Avenue than what size it is, and nearly every habit carried in from a rainier part of the country is the wrong habit here. Greeley sits at 4,676 feet on flat irrigated plain, and the 1991–2020 normal at Greeley–Weld County Airport — our own station, not a borrowed one from down the range — is 15.34 inches of precipitation in a year. What happens below the surface at your particular address is not something we will publish. That takes a geotechnical investigation, and guessing at it in print helps nobody. What is public, regional and genuinely useful is that the Colorado Geological Survey maps a potentially swelling-clay corridor running from Fort Collins and Greeley in the north to Pueblo and Cañon City in the south, with this city at the northern end of it, and clays of that sort can take up a great deal of water. The part we actually work with is the top few inches. Several tons ride on four small pads under a loaded container. Dry, this ground carries them without complaint. Come back after an irrigation set, a cloudburst or a thaw and it will take an impression and keep it. Hence the one rule we never bend: concrete rather than turf, mats under every wheel and both rails, on every drop, in every month of the year — and after a wet week we would sooner move a date than cut up two hundred feet of somebody’s drive.

The houses were built for that climate, and they have a floor below grade. Table R301.2(1) of the residential code Greeley adopted publishes a 30-inch frost line, and the county publishes the same number, so footings, water services and sewer laterals all begin below it. A trench that would be trivial in a warm state is a real excavation here, and trench spoil is the heaviest material that comes off a house. That makes a footing repair or a lateral replacement a 10 yard loaded low conversation and never a 20 yard one. Where it changes a cleanout is the stairs, because hand-carrying is the job: a smaller box set close to the walkout beats a bigger one parked wherever suited the truck. Two dates belong in the same breath, since they decide when outdoor work can start at all — the average last spring frost is 12 May and the first fall frost is 8 October. And because it comes up whenever a lower level is opened up: on radon we quote EPA rather than a map, and EPA’s position is that elevated readings have turned up in every zone it draws, so “all homes should be tested, regardless of zone designation.”

The age of the housing splits this market in half, and it is the half nobody expects who knows northern Colorado only from the newer corridor towns. The median Greeley home dates from 1985. Roughly 46 percent of the stock is older than 1980 and 7.2 percent of it was standing before 1940, while 39.1 percent of households here rent, against 22.1 percent across the county. So: an old city sitting inside the fastest-growing county in the state. 115,073 people on 49.09 square miles, incorporated 15 November 1885 out of the 1870 Union Colony, at the middle of a Weld County of 378,426 that turns out over 80 percent of Colorado’s oil and gas and $2.38 billion of agricultural product a year. Those figures are Census. Translated into containers it means two different loads on the same street: one is plaster, cast iron, pre-1978 paint and a third covering of shingle, the other is new-build tidy-up and a first remodel. The older one weighs considerably more, and it is the one we get called for.

Then the weather, where one hazard outranks the rest of the list put together. Hail is what pays for containers in this county. Northeastern Colorado runs seven to nine hail days a year inside the most hail-prone corridor in the United States, and the work never spreads itself out. It lands in one week, after one storm, with every roofer in Weld dialing the same numbers before eight in the morning. If your roof has just been hit, book it that day — and know that on a Greeley roof there is a sizing consequence attached, because a second course of asphalt still on the deck reaches lawful payload while the box still looks part used. Wind is second, and it is the one that damages property. Chinook downslope events come off the range hard enough to have produced recorded Front Range gusts of 137 mph, and the county publishes a residential design wind of 115 mph. A county does not write a figure like that down for decoration. An empty box walks, a heaped one redistributes itself along the street, and a loose tarp is a kite — so we weight whatever we cover, and we would rather tuck a container behind a windbreak than leave it standing in the open. Third, tornadoes: Weld has recorded more of them than any county in the United States, most of them short-lived landspouts on the Denver convergence zone, most of them on afternoons that looked unremarkable from the ground. And it is not only the big regional events. On 2 June 2014 a breach on the Cache la Poudre sent water into Greeley itself and prompted voluntary evacuations, with damage around 35th Avenue and F Street — a separate event from the September 2013 floods, in a city built at a river confluence. Warnings come out of NWS Denver/Boulder on 303-494-3210. A container left open through a real storm fills with water and grit, and you then pay us by the ton to carry it away. Cover it, or ask us for a tarp.

And there is one more calendar worth planning around here that no other market in this county has. Every May, three things land in the same fortnight. The last frost lifts around 12 May, so outdoor demolition and landscaping start. The university’s academic year ends in early May and leases turn over in a city that is 39.1 percent renter-occupied. And the City runs its two-day Spring Clean-Up, the one that refuses construction and demolition debris and turns away bagged loads. We do not publish a statistic about it, because there is not an honest one to publish — but that is the shape of the Greeley year, it is the busiest fortnight we have, and the practical advice is simply to book earlier in the first half of May than you think you need to. The other end of that cycle is mid-August. Our guide to move-out and rental turnover is written for landlords and property managers who live with both ends of it.

Collection inside the city limits is the City’s arrangement and it is written down, which is more than most markets can say. § 8-371 makes the City “the sole agency for the collection and disposal of refuse” acting through “city-licensed operators”, and § 8-368 requires the license. We describe that regime and say nothing about our own position under it in either direction. What is constant, and what matters to you, is the part no cart program anywhere solves: no residential collection is built for construction and demolition debris. Shingles, drywall, cabinets, tile, plaster, concrete and framing lumber are ours to handle, and a cart is not a kitchen tear-out, a basement or a roof.

The City makes that point better than we can, once a year. The Greeley Annual Spring Clean-Up runs two days in early May — the City’s own answer to “how do I get rid of this?” — and its published exclusion list refuses exactly what a roll-off exists for: “Construction or demolition debris (including dirt, concrete, masonry, plywood, and similar materials).” Bagged loads are turned away, it is residents only with photo ID, and the line is 970-350-9336. That is not our claim about a municipal program; it is the municipality’s own list, published by the City of Greeley. Check the dates each year rather than assuming last year’s. Our guide to what the City clean-up will not take goes through it item by item.

Underneath the City sits the county, and here the county layer is unusually easy to describe because there is only one county. Weld County collects no residential waste anywhere in the county. Inside the city limits the arrangement is the City’s own, under Title 8, Chapter 11 and § 8-371, and the county sits underneath it collecting nothing from anyone. What the county runs instead is drop-off. Weld County runs a household hazardous waste facility at 1311 North 17th Avenue in Greeley — free to every Weld County resident, open Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 8 to 5, on (970) 400-2217, capped at 200 pounds per household per visit, nothing in a container over five gallons, nothing leaking and nothing in a plastic bag. Electronics and appliances are not accepted there, so those need a route of their own. Paint, solvents, pesticides, pool chemicals and automotive fluids cannot go in a roll-off, and this is where they go instead. The county also publishes a seasonal landfill voucher, one per Weld County address, for a single load. Every one of the seventeen places on this site is in Weld County, so both of those are open to every customer we have — which is a genuinely useful thing about working in one county instead of two. Neither the drop-off nor the voucher is a curbside service and neither takes job debris. That, in a paragraph, is the argument for a container — and it is not our argument. It is the two governments’ own description of what they do and do not do.

Sizes we deliver to Monroe Avenue