What a house clearance involves
A house clearance is the planned removal of household contents from a property. Clients use it when a home is being sold, when someone has died, when a tenancy has ended, or when a house has been left furnished and unused. The job can be a whole building or a defined set of rooms.
The work usually includes sorting, lifting, carrying, loading and taking goods away. It may also include dismantling large furniture if that is the only practical way to get it out. What it does not include, unless agreed separately, is cleaning, repairs, garden landscaping or the removal of materials that need a specialist contractor.
Full clearances, rooms and furniture
A full clearance means the rooms you specify are emptied. Families sometimes want the living spaces cleared but a workshop or studio left intact. Others need the house, garage and loft done together because a sale or probate timetable requires the building to be vacant.
Smaller jobs are common: a single bedroom suite, a dining room used for storage, the last rooms after a staged move, or a sofa and wardrobe that will not fit in a car. Large pieces are awkward to move and wasteful to treat as automatic rubbish. Tell us what the pieces are, which floor they are on, and whether anything is built-in. Photographs of the furniture and of the route out of the building prevent a quote that collapses on the day.
See what we can and cannot take if you are unsure about particular items.
Garages, lofts and gardens
These are part of a house clearance when you ask for them — they are not assumed. They can also be cleared on their own if the house itself is staying furnished.
Garages collect tools, leftover decorating materials, furniture and boxes. Volume is easy to underestimate from the doorway. Photographs from the door and from inside, plus a note about whether a car is still in the space, are useful. Paints, solvents, fuels, gas cylinders and possible asbestos in older roofs or tiles belong on the special-handling list before we quote.
Lofts are usually constrained by access rather than the list of items. Hatch size, boarding, how sound the joists are, and whether anyone can stand up inside all affect labour. Older Cornish houses often have small hatches. Photograph the hatch and as much of the interior as is safe; do not walk on unboarded joists to get a picture. Search the first boxes for documents, photographs and small tins before the main clearance.
Gardens and sheds often hold a second household: outdoor furniture, tools, leftover materials and a greenhouse or shed that has not been opened in years. This is removal of stored goods, not hedge cutting, tree work or landscaping. The distance from the back hedge to where a vehicle can stand is often the expensive part. Mention steps, side passages and fuels or corrugated sheets you cannot identify.
Household accumulations — bags, broken furniture, leftover packaging — are still sorted. Usable goods are not automatically waste. If you can load residual material yourself and have somewhere legal to site a skip, house clearance versus skip hire explains when a skip is the simpler structure.
Cornwall properties and access
Houses in Cornwall sit in towns, villages and isolated positions. Cottages with narrow stairs, holiday flats with long carries, farms with several outbuildings and terraces with limited parking all change how a clearance is planned. A quote is more accurate when you describe:
- narrow lanes or limited turning space
- the distance from the door to where a vehicle can stand
- stairs, no lift, or a steep approach
- parking restrictions
- unusually heavy objects
- sheds, lofts and other structures that also need emptying
If you are dealing with a property you cannot easily visit, read house clearance when you live outside Cornwall.
What happens to the contents
Usable furniture and household goods should be identified before they are treated as rubbish. Some pieces have resale or reuse value; others are suitable for recycling as materials. Residual waste is disposed of through authorised routes. We do not describe this as zero waste, and we do not publish a recycling rate we cannot evidence. The approach is set out on the reuse and recycling page.
How to prepare
Before the clearance date, remove or clearly mark anything you want to keep. Check for documents, photographs, jewellery and items named in a will. Photograph the rooms if you have not already. A longer checklist is in the guide how to prepare for a house clearance.
Cost
Price follows volume, labour, vehicles, access and the type of material — not the number of bedrooms. Two similar houses can produce very different loads. The house clearance cost guide explains the variables we use when quoting.