Deciding what stays and what goes before a property hits the market isn't just a cleaning question.

The usual assumption about clearing an overgrown lot is that it takes one of two approaches: a bulldozer pushing everything into a pile to burn or haul, or a chainsaw crew working tree by tree for days.

You've got a fence line buried under blackberry canes and volunteer saplings, a side gate barely three feet wide, and a truck-mounted brush hog that will never fit through it.

A tree can come down for a handful of reasons: root rot that finally gave out, a wind gust that caught a tree already leaning, disease that hollowed the trunk from the inside, or simple age catching up with a shallow root system.

That table covers the five things that turn a same-day fence or deck removal into a longer job, and each one is worth a few minutes of checking before equipment or crew time gets scheduled.

You decide the china cabinet is not coming, and then discover the charity cannot send a truck for three weeks. Most of what goes wrong in a downsize is scheduling.

The remodel is finished, the new fixtures are in, and the space finally looks the way you wanted.

A bank-owned property looks, at first glance, like a large house cleanout. The volume is familiar and the work looks like ordinary hauling. It is not.

The truck pulls away with the old couch, the dead treadmill, and three garbage bags of who-knows-what, and for most people the story ends right there.

You are standing at the edge of a pool you haven't swum in for two summers, maybe three.

The mower catches on it before you consciously register that anything is off. A rectangle near the back fence rides a little lower than the rest of the yard, or the grass across it stays greener and thicker than everywhere around it, even through a dry stretch.

You booked the appointment, and now a crew is coming to haul away the pile that has taken over the garage, the spare room, or the back lot.

A crew can pull up to two jobs in the same week and find that two pools measuring about the same on the tape are nothing alike in the amount of work.

An old refrigerator, a sagging sofa, a treadmill nobody uses, a tube TV gathering dust in the garage.

When the water's gone, what's left looks like a hole in the ground, and a hole in the ground seems like something you fill with dirt until the yard is level again.

Fill in an in-ground pool and the cavity takes less imported dirt than the pool held water.

Clearing out an entire home is one of those tasks that looks manageable from the doorway and grows heavier the moment you step inside.

The tree came down last season, but the stump is still sitting in the lawn, and now you face a decision that sounds simple and is not: grind it down or dig it out.

A driveway that has carried tires down the same track for years and a strip of gravel that went in last week don't behave the same way underfoot, even when the same crew builds both.

A driveway that's been topped off twice in two years and still looks thin isn't necessarily getting the wrong gravel.