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House clearance or skip hire: which is better?

When a house needs emptying, a skip on the drive is the first idea many people have. Sometimes it is the right one, and often it is not. This guide compares the two honestly, without prices, so you can decide which suits the job in front of you.

Who does the lifting

This is the biggest difference, and it is easy to underestimate. The skip company drops the skip off and collects it again, but everything in between is down to you. Every wardrobe has to be carried down the stairs, every box brought down from the loft and every armful of garden tools walked out of the shed and lifted over the side. For a whole house that can mean days of heavy work, often with help from friends or family.

With a house clearance, the crew does the carrying, the loading and the disposal. You let them in, or arrange for a key safe, letting agent, solicitor or neighbour to do it, and the property is emptied room by room and left swept. For anyone who is short of time, lives far from the property or simply cannot carry a sofa down a flight of stairs, that difference usually decides it.

Permits for a skip on the road

If the skip can go on your own drive, there is normally no permit to worry about. If it has to sit on the road or the pavement, it generally needs a permit from the local council, which the skip company usually arranges on your behalf. Councils set their own conditions, and these can cover how long it may stay, where it can be placed and the lights or markings it needs at night.

Permits take time to come through, and some streets are harder than others, particularly where parking is tight or restricted. Flats are the obvious problem, as there is rarely a drive and a skip outside a block may not be allowed at all. A clearance van only needs somewhere to park while it loads, which is why flat clearance tends to suit a van far better than a skip.

What cannot go in a skip

Skips are meant for general mixed waste, and most hire companies list items they will not accept. These commonly include fridges and freezers, televisions and other electricals, gas bottles, batteries, paint and chemicals, tyres, asbestos and plasterboard, and many also restrict mattresses and upholstered furniture. The exact list varies by company, so read it before you start filling.

That causes a real problem in a house clearance, because a typical home contains several of those things. The fridge freezer, the washing machine, the old television and the sofa all have to go somewhere else, which means separate trips or separate collections on top of the skip. A clearance deals with the appliances and upholstered furniture in the same visit, and if there are paint tins or chemicals we tell you what we can take once we have seen your photos.

Loading, space and what actually fits

A skip is a fixed size. Bulky furniture takes up far more room than people expect, because a sofa, a wardrobe or a bed frame leaves gaps around it that are hard to fill. Unless items are broken down first, a skip can look full long before the house is empty. It also must not be loaded above its sides, and an overfilled skip may not be collected until it has been levelled off.

You also need space for it. A skip on the drive blocks the car, and one on the road takes up parking for as long as it is there. A skip left out overnight is open to passers-by adding their own rubbish, which then takes up space you are paying for. A clearance van arrives, is loaded and leaves, and nothing is left sitting outside the property.

How long each option takes

Skips are usually hired for a set period, and clearing a full house yourself rarely fits neatly inside it. Sorting, carrying and breaking down furniture around work and other commitments can stretch over several weekends, and if the skip fills before the job is done you need another one. Then there is the time spent dealing with everything that was not allowed in it.

A clearance is booked for a date that suits you, and we offer the earliest date we can wherever possible. The crew arrives with the van, clears the property in one go where the size of the job allows and leaves it swept. You pay the agreed fixed price once the property is empty, which gives an executor or a landlord with a deadline a clear finish date. The preparing for a house clearance guide covers what to do beforehand.

Reuse and where the contents end up

Everything thrown into a skip is treated as mixed waste. Good furniture, working lamps and boxes of usable kitchenware get broken or soiled as other things land on top of them, and by the time the skip is collected very little can be saved. The load is sorted at a waste site, but the chance of reuse has usually gone.

On a clearance, usable furniture and household items are offered to charity or for reuse first, before anything goes to a licensed waste transfer station. That is a large part of how 90% of what we collect ends up recycled. If keeping things in use matters to you, or to the family of someone whose home is being cleared, it is a real point in favour of a clearance.

When a skip makes sense

A skip is genuinely the better choice for some jobs. Building rubble, broken tiles, soil and garden waste from a big tidy-up are heavy, low-value materials that suit a skip well. If you are renovating over several weeks and producing waste a little at a time, a skip on the drive is convenient. And if you have the time, the help and the space, and the contents are mostly general waste that a skip will accept, doing it yourself can work.

A clearance makes more sense when the job is mainly furniture, appliances and household contents, when the property is a flat or has no room for a skip, when nobody can do the lifting, or when there is a deadline. It also suits heavily cluttered homes, where the volume is hard to judge in advance. If you are unsure, send photos of each room and we give you a fixed price to set against a skip before you decide anything. The what affects house clearance cost guide explains what goes into that figure.