A civilian landlord plans backwards from a lease end they helped choose. Near Fort Carson, Peterson and Schriever, the date is set by orders — somewhere else, by someone else, and sometimes it moves after you've been told. Here's what that does to a turnover, and which parts of it you can pin down anyway.
Quarter truck $325 · half $580 · three-quarters $790 · full $985
Upload Photos & Get Quote →It will not tell you what Colorado law requires of you, how long you have to return a deposit, what notice anybody owes anybody, how belongings left behind must be handled, or whether a removal cost may be charged to a departing tenant.
Those are legal questions, and we are a junk removal company. Every one of them is answered by your lease and by an attorney who practises in this area — not by a hauler, not by a property forum, and not by a page written to rank in a search engine.
What we can speak to with any authority is the removal itself: what tends to get left behind here, when the calendar gets tight, what clearing it costs, and what the paperwork looks like afterwards. That is the whole scope of this page, and we would rather be narrow and right.
This is the structural fact that everything else follows from, and it is worth stating plainly.
A tenant moving on orders does not choose when they move. They may know the season before they know the month, and the month before they know the week. They tell you as soon as they can, and what they tell you is often honest and still provisional.
A landlord elsewhere works from a lease end date that was negotiated, agreed and effectively fixed. You are frequently working from a window — and a window is not a date, however much your make-ready schedule would prefer one.
None of that is anybody behaving badly. It is simply how the job that pays your rent operates. The mistake is running a process that assumes precision it is never going to get.
Not the date itself — the things you'd normally chain to it.
You can't confidently pre-book trades. Painters, carpet, cleaners and handymen all want a firm day, and a day you move twice is a day you eventually lose to someone else's job.
You can't confidently pre-let. Committing to an incoming tenant's start date against a departure that hasn't hardened is how landlords end up paying for a hotel room.
And you can't see inside the unit until the tenant is out, which means the size of the clearing job — the one thing that determines how long the make-ready takes — is unknown until the moment it becomes urgent.
That last one is the one we can do something about.
Individually the dates are unpredictable. Collectively they are not, and that combination is unusually awkward.
Moves cluster into the warm months, because families move when schools break and because assignment timelines tend to land there. So while you cannot forecast your tenant, you can be confident that a great many other households in El Paso County are doing the same thing in the same fortnight.
Which means the carpet cleaner, the painter, the locksmith and the removal truck are all being asked for by everyone at once. Same-day availability exists, but in the middle of the summer it is genuinely scarce, and it is scarce for every trade at the same time.
The only real mitigation is booking against a window rather than a date. Get a provisional slot early, move it once when the date firms up, and you have converted the least predictable part of the calendar into something close to a fixed appointment. Waiting for certainty is how you end up at the back of the queue in July.
A pattern specific enough to plan for: the tenant is already gone before you see the unit.
Someone reports early, the family follows later, the pack-out happens on a set day and the household leaves the state. Keys come back by mail or through a friend. Whatever is still in the house at the moment the truck fills is what stays in the house.
That produces a recognisable inventory, and it is not random. It is the heavy, the bulky and the awkward — the things a professional pack-out declines or a family runs out of room for.
The specifics recur: a sofa that would not fit around the last corner, a mattress set nobody wanted to move a third time, garage shelving that was screwed to the wall, a treadmill, a grill, a chest freezer, patio furniture, a swing set in the yard.
None of it is unusual. All of it is bulky, which means the volume in a remotely-vacated unit is usually higher than the item count suggests.
Walk the bedrooms and you will conclude the unit is nearly empty. Open the garage and the number changes.
Springs rentals lean hard on their garages, because a lot of the housing stock has no basement. Bikes, tools, shelving, storage totes, seasonal decorations, camping gear, spare tyres and half-finished projects all live out there.
A pack-out prioritises the house. The garage is the last room touched and the first one abandoned when the truck is full — which is why garage clearances are the most common turnover job we run here.
So price the turnover from the garage, not from the bedrooms. If you are estimating remotely from a tenant's photos, ask specifically for the garage, and ask for it with the door up.
The yard is where turnover estimates most often go wrong, because nobody thinks of the outside as contents.
Play structures, trampolines, raised beds, dog runs, sheds, fire pits, stacked firewood and the odd trailer all get left, and all of them are volume. A trampoline is nearly nothing by weight and a surprising amount of truck.
Some of it may have been installed with your knowledge and some of it certainly wasn't. What you are entitled to do about either is, again, a lease question. What we can tell you is that outdoor material takes real space and should be in the quote from the start rather than added on the day.
The distinction between ordinary wear and something chargeable is one landlords are constantly asked to make, and it is not ours to make for you.
We can describe what we removed. We cannot characterise it. Our invoice will say that a sofa, a mattress set and eleven bags of household waste left the property on a given date. It will not say whether that was reasonable, whether it was damage, or whether it belongs on anyone's statement.
If you want a view on that, get it from your attorney. Our Boston guide takes the same line for the same reason — a hauler offering legal characterisations is a hauler creating a problem for a client.
Here is the one genuinely useful thing removal does for your paperwork, and it has nothing to do with the amount.
A cost that came from an outside company on a specific date is a fact about the world. There is a third party, a job, an address and a total. It can be checked. It exists independently of anything you wanted it to be.
A figure you arrived at yourself — however fair, however carefully considered — is an assertion. It may well be the right number. It is still a number with only you behind it, and that is a materially weaker position in any dispute.
So if a removal is going to happen, let it happen as a transaction. Book it, receive it, keep the invoice. Whether the resulting figure can be used for anything is between you, your lease and your attorney — but the difference between a documented cost and an estimated one is the difference between evidence and opinion.
Two minutes of work that is worthless five minutes later, because by then the room is empty.
Photograph each room as you found it, wide enough to show the whole space, before the first item moves. Include the garage with the door open, the yard, and any outbuilding. Timestamps come free with the phone.
Do it even when the unit is clean and you expect no dispute — pictures you never use cost nothing, and not having them costs you the argument. Our crew will wait while you do it.
The one instruction that cannot be inferred, and the one place a turnover goes badly wrong.
Anything you want kept has to be named before we start. Appliances that came with the unit, a fridge you own, blinds, spare keys, paint tins, the shelving in the garage that was there before the tenant arrived — to a crew clearing a vacant house, all of that reads as contents.
Equally, if there is anything you have been advised to preserve rather than dispose of, tell us and it will be set aside untouched and photographed rather than loaded. We will follow the instruction exactly; what we will not do is guess at it.
The reliable version is a short written list, sent before the visit, with the items and where they are. A five-line message prevents the only irreversible mistake available on a turnover.
Sequencing is one of the few parts of an unpredictable turnover that is entirely in your control.
Clear first, then clean, then paint, then carpet. A painter working around a sofa does a worse job slowly. A carpet fitter cannot fit around a treadmill at all, and a cleaner charges you to move things they should never have had to move.
It also compresses the schedule. Clearing is the only step that can happen the same day the keys come back, and getting it done immediately means every later trade walks into an empty box and quotes accurately. The same order applies to apartment turnovers, where access windows are tighter still.
For anyone holding more than one unit, the value is unglamorous and real.
Budgeting. The prices are flat and published, so a removal line can go into a turnover budget before anybody has walked the property. You are not waiting on a site visit to know your range.
Consistency. The same invoice format every time makes records comparable across units and across years, which matters more than it sounds when you are reconstructing a turnover from eighteen months ago.
Speed. The scheduling conversation gets short when we already know the property, the access and the fact that your dates move. In the summer weeks, being quick to book is most of the advantage.
Not every turnover needs a truck, and we would rather say so.
If what's left is genuinely good furniture, donation is the better answer — it costs nothing, and several organisations here collect. Our donation guide covers who takes what and what gets refused, and the refusals are worth reading before you book a pickup that won't happen.
If it's a couple of small items and you have a truck, the self-haul maths sometimes works — although it stops working the moment a second trip or a second person is involved.
If a full renovation is coming anyway, a dumpster may beat us on volume — but only where the schedule is yours and the container can sit for days, which is precisely what a fast turnover isn't.
Flat rates, quoted from photographs before the crew arrives, so the figure you budget is the figure you pay.
| What leaves | Price |
|---|---|
| Minimum job | $75 |
| Sofa | $170 |
| Loveseat | $160 |
| Recliner | $132 |
| Mattress + box spring | $192 |
| Dresser | $169 |
| Large TV | $98 |
| Treadmill | $155 |
| Refrigerator | $221 |
| Rolled carpet | $92 |
| Bag of household waste | $47 |
| Loose pile, small / medium / large | $110 / $174 / $280 |
| Quarter truck (4 cu yd) | $325 |
| Half truck (8 cu yd) | $580 |
| Three-quarter truck (12 cu yd) | $790 |
| Full truck (16 cu yd) | $985 |
Small jobs itemise cheaper; large ones tier cheaper. A sofa and a mattress set on their own come to $362, which beats the tier that volume would fall into. Once you are past four or five pieces the truck tiers win, and we quote whichever is lower without being asked.
What Springs residents actually pay has the fuller breakdown, and the price guide covers items not listed here.
A three-bedroom house off Powers, vacated remotely in July. What was left:
Itemised, that comes to $958. By volume, it is about twelve cubic yards once the garage is loaded, which is a three-quarter truck at $790.
So the tier is $168 cheaper, and that is the number quoted. The garage is more than a third of it — which is exactly why the estimate has to include it, and why a quote built from photographs of the bedrooms alone would have been wrong by hundreds of dollars.
Booked against a provisional handover date in June, moved once when the date firmed, done the morning after the keys came back. The painter walked into an empty house.
The most common outcome here. Price from the garage. Expect a quarter to a half truck if it's tidy, three-quarters if there was shelving and gear. Photograph with the door up.
Expect heavy and awkward rather than lots. Sofa, mattress set, treadmill, grill, shelving. Before disposing of anything left behind, check with your attorney how it must be handled — then tell us what to set aside.
Trampolines, sheds, play structures and firewood are volume, not detail. Get them in the quote up front. Anything anchored or built in needs saying explicitly so we bring the right crew.
Name every appliance that stays. A fridge is $221 to remove; a fridge removed by mistake is a great deal more than that.
Nothing to do. Take the photographs anyway, keep them with the file, and move straight to cleaning. Not every turnover needs us and we will tell you so on the quote call.
Book all three against windows now, in one conversation. Adjust the dates later. The slots are the scarce thing in July, not the trucks.
You cannot control the date, so control everything that hangs off it.
The departure is scheduled by orders and it may move again. Fine. The removal can still be booked against a window, the photographs can still be taken before anything is touched, the set-asides can still be written down, and the cost can still arrive as an invoice from a third party rather than as a number you had to invent.
Do those four things and the unpredictable turnover behaves like an ordinary one for every purpose that matters — which is the most any landlord in this market can reasonably ask of the process.
Flat pricing, itemised invoice, moved dates at no charge
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