Nobody enjoys ringing round for prices and getting a different answer every time, then wondering which one is going to change when the van turns up. So here is exactly what moves the price on a clearance, in plain English. Clearances start from £95, and the price we give you from your photos is the price you pay.
When you send us photos, these are the four things being weighed up. Nothing else. There is no bigger job rate or postcode loading hiding in the background.
You pay for the space it takes up in the van, not for a fixed size you have to fill. This is the one that moves the price most. A few bags and an old wardrobe is a very different job to a full three bedroom house. If you are only part way through sorting, tell us what is likely to be left rather than what is there today, and we will price the real job.
The material matters far more than the weight, and not in the way most people expect. Mixed household waste is one of the dearest things to dispose of, because it has to be sorted at the other end. Clean, separated material is much cheaper, and some of it costs nothing at all: broken concrete and clean brick rubble are among the cheapest loads we take, despite being the heaviest. What heavy material costs instead is labour, because there is no quick way to load rubble other than by hand.
Which is worth knowing, because it can save you money. If you can keep rubble or soil separate from the general waste rather than piling it all together, it is cheaper to deal with. Tell us what is in there and we will price it accordingly.
If we can park close and walk straight in, the job is quicker and it costs you less. A top floor flat with no lift, a long carry down a shared path, a garden only reachable through the house, or nowhere legal to stop the van all add time. It is not a penalty, it is just that the work takes longer. Tell us up front and it gets priced properly first time.
A handful of items cannot go in with general waste, so they carry a small extra charge. Fridges, freezers, mattresses, tyres and upholstered furniture (POPs) are the usual ones. That charge is what the disposal site charges us to handle them properly, not a markup.
No two clearances are the same, so rather than invent a price list, here is which of the four is doing the work on the jobs we get asked about most.
Our smallest sort of job, and the kind that starts at £95. Volume is low and it is usually light, so what really decides it is access. Sat in an open garage or by the front door, it is quick. Carried down two flights of stairs, it takes longer.
Volume drives this one. Green waste, branches and old decking are bulky but relatively light, so it fills the van long before it gets heavy. Access is usually the second factor, particularly if everything has to come through the house or down a narrow side passage.
Often a mix of volume and weight, because garages are where the heavy things end up. Old paving slabs, tiles, bags of hardened cement and car parts push the weight up. The clearance itself is usually easy to reach, which pulls the other way.
Volume, almost entirely. It is normally more than one van load, and access can matter, especially in a terrace with no off street parking. The extras that come up most in a full house clearance are fridges, mattresses and upholstered furniture (POPs): sofas, armchairs and anything foam filled. Those have to be incinerated rather than recycled by law, so they are handled separately and carry a charge.
What the material is decides this one, not how big the pile looks. Clean brick rubble, hardcore and concrete are among the cheapest loads there are to dispose of. Mix them in with general waste, though, and the whole lot has to be priced as general waste, which is the dearest stream of the lot. Keeping it separate genuinely saves money. Plasterboard is its own case again, because it cannot be mixed with general waste at all.
Because it would not be a real number, and you would find that out on the day.
A skip company can advertise prices because a skip is always the same size. A clearance is not. The same "garage clear-out" can be twenty minutes and half a van, or three hours, two loads and a ton of old paving. Any firm publishing one price for that is either quoting for the smallest possible version of it, or building in enough padding to cover the worst.
We would rather look at your photos and give you a number we will stand behind. That takes us about an hour and costs you nothing, and it means the figure you are given is the figure you pay.
The one thing that would change it is if there is noticeably more waste on the day than we were shown. Even then, we talk to you before we touch anything. Nobody gets a bigger bill handed to them at the end.
Still not sure about something? Ask us. You do not need a job lined up, and there is nothing to pay for an answer.
Contact us with a questionFree, no-obligation quotes, usually within the hour. You will get Joel, not a call centre.