A guy off Ustick called us last spring because his dog came in from the backyard limping. The vet pulled a roofing nail out of the pad. The house had been finished for two months, and nobody had thought about construction cleanup past the front door.

That's the part of construction cleanup in Boise nobody plans for. The inside of the house gets cleaned because you're standing in it.

The dirt around the house gets whatever patience is left at the end of a build, which usually isn't much.

So if you just wrapped a new build, an addition, or a gut remodel, the yard is where the leftovers are. Here's what's down there and how to deal with it before sod goes in.

What ends up in the dirt after a build

Every trade that touched your house dropped something outside. Framers toss offcuts over a shoulder without looking. Nails roll, and roofers drop a lot of them.

Then the drywall crew shakes scraps out by the garage, and the siding guys leave Tyvek strips knotted into the fence line.

Nobody's being sloppy on purpose. The guy who made the mess is three jobs down the road before anybody notices.

Here's what we typically pull out of a new-build yard in Meridian or south Boise:

✓Framing offcuts and busted 2x4s half buried in the backfill
✓Roofing nails, drywall screws, and staples ringing the whole house
✓Tyvek scraps, shingle wrappers, and banding tangled in the fence
✓Broken tile, grout buckets, and dried thinset behind the garage
✓Concrete washout piles where a truck chute got rinsed

The washout piles surprise people every time. A driver rinses out somewhere convenient, and six weeks later you've got a 200-pound gray lump that a shovel just bounces off.

Why a magnet sweep matters more than you'd think

Metal is the real problem. Wood you can see and pick up.

A galvanized roofing nail sitting point-up in loose dirt is invisible until it's in a tire, a paw, or your bare foot.

Rolling magnets run somewhere between $60 and $150, and they work. What people get wrong is timing and coverage.

Tip: Do your magnet sweep *after* the final grade, not before. Grading turns the soil over and brings buried metal right back up to the surface. Sweep first, let a skid steer churn the yard, and you've done the work twice while still missing the nails.

One pass isn't enough either. Go around the drip line twice, in two directions, then hit the driveway and whatever path the crews walked from their trucks to the back.

That's where the density is. We almost always pick up more metal on the second perpendicular pass than the first.

Scheduling construction cleanup around your landscaper

Timing trips up more homeowners than anything else here. Sod and sprinkler crews aren't going to clean your yard.

They'll install right over the top of whatever's sitting there, and honestly they should, because that's not what you hired them for.

So the order goes: haul the debris, final grade, magnet sweep, then landscaping. Flip any two of those and you're paying for the same work twice.

Give yourself a few days of buffer. We handle construction cleanup all over the Treasure Valley, and the jobs that go smoothest are the ones booked a week ahead of the sod truck instead of the morning of.

Not sure whose job this is in the first place? We got into that in our post on who handles construction cleanup on a Boise job site.

Short version: it depends on your contract, and most contracts are vaguer about it than you'd like.

What construction cleanup costs around the Treasure Valley

Most post-build yard cleanups we run land between $400 and $850. A light pass with some lumber and a few bags of scrap sits at the low end.

A yard with concrete chunks, a washout pile, and buried drywall goes higher, because weight is what drives the price, not how full the truck looks.

Concrete and dirt are the expensive part. Ada County Landfill charges by the ton, and a modest pile of broken concrete outweighs a whole truckload of framing scrap.

Clean metal we run over to Western Recycling, which takes a little off the top. Usable lumber sometimes finds a home instead of a hole in the ground.

If you've got a decent stack of it sitting there, read what to do with leftover building materials before you pay anybody to haul it off.

Should you just do it yourself? If it's a pickup load of scrap wood and you've got a free Saturday, sure.

The transfer stations around Boise and Nampa aren't hard to use and the fees are reasonable. It stops being fun once concrete is in the mix, or when the pile weighs more than it looked like it would. Which it always does.

Most of the construction cleanup jobs we take in Nampa and Caldwell come from somebody who filled their truck twice, did the math on the rest of their weekend, and tapped out.

Bottom line

The yard is the last ten percent of a build, and it's the part that actually hurts people. Get the debris out, grade it, sweep it with a magnet twice in two directions, then landscape.

That order saves money and keeps nails out of your tires.

If you'd rather not give up a weekend to it, call us at (208) 593-2877. We'll come look and tell you what it'll run, and if it's something you could knock out yourself in an afternoon, we'll say that too.