Junk removal in Greely.
A rural village in Osgoode Ward, on big lots, private wells and septic beds. The job here is outbuildings, not condo moves.
Greely is a rural village inside the City of Ottawa, in Osgoode Ward, and we work it. Shadow Ridge, Sunset Lakes, Woodstream, Greely Orchard, Water's Edge and the village centre at Bank and Parkway.
The Greely Community Association draws the boundaries at Mitch Owens Road, Snake Island Road, Sale Barn and Greyscreek Roads and Manotick Station Road. Wikipedia records the population inside those lines as 9,049 at the 2011 census, and calls it Ottawa's largest rural village by land area with a citation-needed flag attached, so treat the second as a claim rather than a measurement.
The shape matters more than the head count. This is a low density community of large properties, not a growth suburb: garages, sheds, barns, workshops and pole buildings, and clear-outs where the house is the smallest part of the job.
Two things change how a job runs here and neither is the drive. Almost every property is on its own well and septic bed, and one subdivision is not.
Osgoode Ward, City of Ottawa
Township of Osgoode until amalgamation in 2001. Inside city limits on the map, rural in everything that decides a job.
Half-acre to two-acre lots
Wikipedia records most homes on half an acre to two acres. Room to stage a load, and a bed nobody can drive over.
Private wells, private septic
Other than Shadow Ridge, properties supply their own water and treat their own sewage. Everything below follows from it.
The City of Ottawa operates six communal groundwater well systems in its rural areas, and one of them is here: Greely, serving the Shadow Ridge subdivision. Other rural residents, in the City's own words, typically get their water from private wells. That is the rest of Greely.
The source protection record for that system is more specific than most people expect. It describes Shadow Ridge as designed with private services, two wells about 10 m apart, the City as owner and operator, and roughly 30 residences served. Four wellhead protection areas are drawn around it, at travel times of immediate, two years, five years and twenty-five years.
Then it lists the activity classes that could be a significant drinking water threat in a vulnerable area near that source: waste disposal sites, sewage works, agricultural activities, pesticides, salt and snow, fuel, and chemicals. Read that against the back wall of an ordinary Greely barn. Fuel cans, a half-used bag of pesticide, drums, solvent, old paint. Those come out of a load before it leaves, not at a landfill scale house.
Septic is the constraint on the other side. The City's Wells page states plainly that damaged septic systems can contaminate groundwater with E. coli or nitrate, and a bed is not built to carry weight. Tell us where yours runs and the truck, the bin and anything on tracks stay off it. On two acres that costs nothing.
Barns, sheds and the back of the property.
The housing is estate-scale and mostly modern. Growth here is recent rather than historic: the City's occupied dwelling estimates record a 58.7 per cent rise in the number of dwellings between 2000 and 2008.
We will not put a date range on the older farmhouse stock. None of our sources measures it, so what is inside the walls of a Greely house is for a testing lab to establish rather than a decade label to imply. That matters for a tear-out and not at all for emptying a garage.
What that adds up to is a different list of jobs from the one an inside-the-Greenbelt page describes. A garage that has held two vehicles and a workshop for fifteen years. A shed that stopped being a shed. A pole barn on a property bought for the land. A house emptied after a death, where nothing was thrown away because space was never short.
Two of those are not hauling. Taking a shed or a deck apart is demolition, and a property being cleared to a listing date is estate and pre-sale cleaning. On a lot this size that difference is about sequence, not access: the structure comes down before the pile can leave.
The curb has a rural exception, and it is narrow.
Greely has curbside collection on the same three items every two weeks as the rest of the city, and bulky items and furniture cannot be bagged at all, which is what stops a garage going out that way. The junk removal page works through the rest of those rules.
The part that only applies out here is the Agriculture Exemption Program. A residential agricultural property with curbside collection may set out three items of household garbage plus an unlimited amount of unavoidable farm waste, which the City defines as the normal by-product of farming operations and illustrates with plastic haylage wrappings, bale twine and rope, and plastic drainage tiles. Qualifying takes a Municipal Property Assessment Corporation assessment in both the residential and farmland tax classes, and use of recycling and the green bin during scheduled collection.
Read that list again for what is not on it. Barn board, fencing, a trailer nobody has moved since 2019, tires, drums and scrap steel are not unavoidable farm waste, and a farmland tax class does not move any of it. That gap is most of what we get called for in Greely.
One thing the lot sizes settle for you. In the older parts of the city a disposal bin is a municipal transaction: the City lists a bin in a roadway or public laneway as work requiring a Temporary Construction Related Encroachment permit under Road Activity By-law 2003-445, with a minimum of ten business days to process. On half an acre the bin, the truck and any equipment sit on your own ground and none of that arises.
The landfill is on the wrong side of the south end.
If you are hauling it yourself, the City site is the Trail Waste Facility Landfill at 4475 Trail Road, off Moodie Drive south of Fallowfield Road. From Greely that is a run across the rural south end rather than a straight line down Bank Street, loaded out and empty back, as many times as the building holds. Two rules catch rural loads in particular.
CSA green patch footwear and high visibility clothing are required for the Main Disposal Area and Small Load Area #2 at the tipping face; without them you are limited to Small Load Area #1. And the facility carries a permanent ban on industrial, commercial and institutional waste, with commercial leaf and yard waste, metal and e-waste still accepted. Greely has a working commercial strip, so a shop clear-out and a house clear-out do not end up in the same place.
The City also recommends sorting before you arrive, which is the argument for one sorted load instead of four unsorted ones. Gate hours change through the season, and the City lists the current ones on its Trail Waste Facility page.
Priced on what leaves, not on how far we drove.
Junk removal is priced by the space a load takes on the truck, adjusted for weight and for the carry. Greely is generous on the carry: no stairs between the barn and the tailgate. Volume and weight move the number instead. An outbuilding produces more than a basement, and barn board and scrap steel weigh what they weigh.
We publish no rate card, because a rate card cannot see your barn. What we do publish is how the model works and what other Ottawa haulers charge for the same load sizes, on the pricing page. Send photos, or walk us round the property on the phone, and the figure comes back before anything moves, confirmed on site and agreed before the first item goes on the truck.
Greely, specifically.
Something not here? Text (613) 852-4059.
No. Greely is inside City of Ottawa limits and on our declared service area list. It is the furthest south we go, so give us a date range rather than an hour. Distance does not change how a load is priced; the pricing page sets out what does.
Where the septic bed and the tank lids sit, where the wellhead is, and whether the driveway will carry a loaded truck. A bed is not built to take weight, and on half an acre there is almost always somewhere else to park. The only version that goes wrong is the one where nobody asked.
Only near it. The source protection record for the Greely system lists fuel, chemicals, pesticides and waste disposal sites among the activity classes that can be significant drinking water threats in a vulnerable area. That does not stop a cleanout; it means fuel cans, solvents, pesticide and old paint come out of the load. Whether your address falls inside one of those areas is for the City's Risk Management Official, not us.
Almost certainly not, and it is worth knowing before you plan around it. The exemption covers unavoidable farm waste: the normal by-product of farming operations, illustrated by the City with haylage wrap, bale twine and drainage tiles. A barn full of lumber, fencing, tires and drums is a different category.
On your own driveway, nothing. The permit requirement attaches to a bin placed in a roadway or public laneway, and takes a minimum of ten business days to process. Lots here run half an acre to two acres, so a bin sits on private ground. A shared or private lane is the exception, and that is a phone call before a delivery date is set.
Sometimes, and we will say so. Check the gate first. The City lists the Trail Waste Facility open Monday to Friday 7 am to 6 pm, closed Sunday, and open on selected Saturdays only, which the same City page names. One trailer of yard waste is a morning. A barn is four or five loaded trips.
Where these facts come from
Each read on its own live page, on the date shown.
- City of Ottawa, Municipal well systems read
- City of Ottawa, Wells read
- Raisin-South Nation Source Protection, Greely drinking water system read
- City of Ottawa, Agriculture Exemption Program read
- City of Ottawa, Curbside garbage collection read
- City of Ottawa, Temporary construction related encroachments read
- City of Ottawa, Trail Waste Facility Landfill read
- Wikipedia, Greely, Ontario read
Clearing a barn in Greely?
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