Deck removal cost: $5 to $15 a square foot, or $229 a pile

When a contractor hands you $2,400, that number is two jobs stapled together. The first is demolition, which is a person with a pry bar and about eight hours. The second is getting close to a ton of lumber off your property.

Almost every quote hides the second job inside the first. So when you decide to save money by doing the demo yourself, you save the labor and you inherit the wood.

We should be plain about which half we do. Dropcurb does not tear decks down. Nobody on our side touches a pry bar or a ledger board. We do the second job, and it is $229 for the pile.

If you are replacing the deck, get the tear-out quoted as a line on the new build. The crew and the truck are already coming. It is the cheapest demolition you will ever buy, and hiring a separate demo company on top of a build is money lit on fire.

If the boards are cedar or redwood, straight and mostly free of nails, list them before you do anything else. Good deck boards go in a day to people building raised beds. Habitat ReStore may take usable lumber, though every affiliate sets its own rules, so call yours.

If you own a truck and have a free weekday, self-hauling to a transfer station is the cheapest paid route. Most run $30 to $80 a load, and rates vary by facility.

Those are real answers. If one of them fits you, take it.

Two of them stop on paper. Yard waste and green waste will not take deck lumber, because treated, painted and stained wood is kept out of the mulch stream. It is not firewood either.

Most city bulk pickup excludes construction and demolition debris, and a torn-out deck is exactly that. Search your city page for that phrase before you plan a weekend around it. Some cities do take lumber if it is cut short, bundled, tied and under a weight limit. Rules are set locally and change, so read yours rather than finding out on collection day.

The last one stops in your driveway.

A 200 square foot deck is close to a ton of wood, sometimes two. Call it 40 deck boards, 16 joists, a beam, six posts, the rails and the stairs. Every board has nails in it.

That is several pickup loads. A 20 yard dumpster runs $300 to $500, takes the driveway for a week, often needs a permit if it sits in the street, and comes with a weight allowance that wet lumber eats faster than people expect. The transfer station is open the exact hours you are at work.

So the demo takes a weekend and the pile takes a season. Nobody prices that part.

You do not load anything. You do not rent a container, drive to a dump, back a trailer, or find someone with a truck and a free Saturday.

Here is the whole ask. The wood has to be somewhere outside that a hauler can reach: the curb, the driveway, the side yard, or wherever it already fell. Then you book. A local hauler comes with a truck and loads it.

You do not need to be home, and nobody goes inside the house.

"I was concerned this wasn't a legit company, but they absolutely are and I'm so glad I found them as I was quoted $1500 by another company in the St. Louis area. I was provided with photos from the pickup to validate that the items had been removed." — Melissa Mader, on Google

That is the normal reaction after a demo quote. We move more than 1,000 items a month, and we are rated 5.0 on Google across 150+ reviews and 4.9 on Trustpilot across 125+. Every pickup gets photographed, because you are usually not standing there when it happens.

Most people wait. They plan to schedule the pickup once the last board is stacked. That costs a day for no reason.

Book by 2 PM and a local hauler comes that day where same-day pickup is running, seven days a week. So if you are tearing out on Saturday, book Saturday morning. You get a text with the ETA before the hauler arrives, so the wood does not sit out front for three days waiting on someone.

If your HOA or your building has rules about what can sit by the street, that text is what keeps you inside them. And the price you see when you book is the price. It does not change at the curb.

A ground-level deck is a reasonable weekend. You need a pry bar, a reciprocating saw, a socket set for the lag bolts, gloves and boots. Work top down: railings, deck boards, joists, the beam, then posts. Two people and about eight hours covers most 200 square foot ground-level decks.

Two kinds of deck are not weekend jobs. A second-story deck comes down in pieces over a drop, and once the boards are off the frame is a bolted skeleton you are standing on. An attached deck has a ledger board lagged into the rim joist behind your siding. Get that wrong and water sits inside a wall you will not find for a year.

If yours is either one, pay a demo crew for the tear-out and handle only the wood.

Posts sit one of three ways: bolted to a bracket on a pier, buried in a poured footing, or set straight in dirt. Bracket posts unbolt in a minute. Dirt-set posts pull with a jack and a chain.

Poured footings are the problem. A footing is a concrete cylinder 10 to 16 inches across, sunk below the local frost line, which is about a foot in the south and up to four feet in the north. That is a few hundred pounds of concrete in a hole. You dig around it and lever it out, break it up in place, or cut the post off at grade and leave it.

Leaving them is fine unless you are pouring a patio on the same footprint. If you do pull them, curbside pickup is $109 for the first footing and $20 for each one after.

It depends on your city and on whether the deck is attached to the house. Plenty of building departments require a permit to demolish an attached structure, and some want an inspection once the ledger is off and the siding is patched. A freestanding low deck is more often exempt. Rules are set locally, so ask your building department specifically about demolishing an attached deck.

If you are digging out footings, call 811 so buried lines get marked. That one is free and takes a few days, so make it before you pick a weekend.