What Size Dumpster Do I Need? A Thornton Homeowner's Guide

It is the first question everyone asks, and the honest answer starts by turning the question around. The size you need depends less on how much debris you have than on how heavy it is and how much room you have to place the container. Get those two right and the size chooses itself.

Start with weight, not volume

Every container has both a volume and a weight limit, and it is almost always the weight you hit first on a heavy job. Dense material - concrete, brick, tile, and the expansive Front Range clay - reaches the legal hauling weight while the box still looks half empty. Light, bulky material - furniture, packaging, cleared brush - fills the volume long before the weight. So the first question is not how big, but how heavy.

The 10 yard: heavy material

The 10 yard is the heavy specialist. It is small precisely because the material it carries is so dense. A driveway or patio tear-out, a foundation dig, clay spoil off a Front Range grading job - all of that goes in a 10 yard, because a bigger box filled with it could not be legally hauled. If your load is mostly masonry or clay, this is your container regardless of how much of it there is.

The 15 and 20 yard: remodels

For a single-room remodel - a bathroom, a kitchen, a bedroom re-floor - the 15 yard is the value pick, big enough for the mixed debris without paying for space you will not use. The 20 yard is the all-rounder and our most requested size: a multi-room remodel, a big garage clearance, or a single-layer hail roof tear-off sized to shingle weight.

The 30 and 40 yard: big jobs

The 30 yard is the whole-house-cleanout and major-renovation container - household contents are bulky, so a furnished home fills one. The 40 yard is the maximum, for high-volume light debris on big construction, commercial or land-clearing jobs. Neither is for heavy material: fill either with rubble or clay and it is over legal weight while it looks half full.

Thornton-specific sizing notes

Two local factors shape sizing here. First, the hail-prone Front Range means roof tear-offs are constant, and those size by shingle weight, not volume - a 20 yard that looks half full may be done. Second, because no resident program will take a contractor's debris and the county runs no service, whatever you choose is going to a licensed landfill, so getting the size right the first time saves an unnecessary second haul.

When in doubt, describe the job to us and send a photo of where the container will sit. We would rather help you get it right up front than swap a wrong-sized box halfway through.