Barn Demolition in York County, PA

A pole barn is mostly posts, purlins and sheet metal. It comes apart in a fairly predictable order. An old timber or wood-frame barn is a different animal: heavy beams, pegged joints, add-ons from three different decades, sometimes a stone lower level. Those take longer and need more care, and they're the ones with lumber worth saving.

Older barns can also hide materials we can't touch. If something looks like asbestos siding or roofing, that has to be handled by a specialist before we take the barn down.

Around Dillsburg, East Berlin and the farm country along the York and Adams county line, a lot of these barns have outlived the farms they were built for. They're still standing mostly out of habit. When one finally needs to go, it helps to have somebody who will clear it, take it down and haul it without three different companies involved.

Barn debris trips over several of the county's rules at once. York County's Small Load Drop-Off does not accept metal siding or metal beams, railroad ties, stone, or asbestos, clay, concrete or slate shingles.^[1]

Asphalt and metal shingles are accepted, but only one pickup truck or small trailer load per disposal, and lumber has to be cut to 6 feet or less.^[1]

Most barns we see are still full: broken implements, old feed bins, tires, scrap, furniture somebody meant to fix. We haul that out first so the tear-down starts on an empty building.

Old barns also collect chemicals: pesticide jugs, fuel cans, half-used paint. We don't take hazardous waste, so set those aside. York County holds two free household hazardous waste collection events a year, one in spring and one in fall, and registration is required.^[2]