House clearance tips
Introduction
House clearance is the act of removing any unwanted or outdated contents, items and rubbish from your house. House clearance can be a demanding mission to undertake. Therefore, if you do not want to go through the whole process you could hire a house clearing agent to assist you. However, through proper management and planning house clearance can be a less stressful task to undertake. The following tips will ensure that everything runs smoothly and good results.
Step 1
Work out the time needed for house clearance
Plan for a specific day and enough time you will need to perform house clearance. Allocate enough time to each room according to its size and amount of items in it. Giving yourself enough time makes you relaxed and reduces the amount of stress.
Step 2
Decide what to keep and what to discard
Go through everything that is in your house together with your family. Decide the items to keep, sell and give away or discard. Note down the decision you make or mark the items using different colored stickers for the different items to avoid confusion. After marking the items, move the items with the same sticker color to one side. But remember to start with items that you will not need since it does not matter if they get damaged when moving them without enough space available. After you have enough space, move the items that you want to retain.
Step 3
Estimate the stuff amount
Estimate the volume of all your staff. Use the standard builder's skip when doing the estimations. Move from room to room as you estimate the skips that each sticker category would fill. After making your estimates, do the totals of each category and plan on how to move everything.
Step 4
Dispose unwanted items
During the house clearance process, you could hire a van too take it to your local tip or call the council to arrange for large waste collection. Using your local council is cheap but could take weeks before they respond. Alternatively, you could use the services of professionals. They arrive within an hour and a half and their services are relatively fair as they include loading and sweeping.
Step 5
Personal documents
Be careful while disposing personal documents as the rates of identity theft are raising at an alarming rate. If you are disposing hospital records or credit card reports, make sure you shred them to destroy them completely. Also be careful not to discard documents that you might need to use in the near future during the house clearance process.
Tips
- When moving items that have not been in use for a long time, open the windows and wear a dust mask.
- Be careful when lifting heavy objects especially if you have had an operation before.
- If you cannot finish the whole process in one day, have daily targets could be a room per day.
- If you are working with a clearance company, ask for an invoice and their past performance records.
- Ask for company suggestions from your family and friends.
- Go through the house clearance companies terms of service and insist on a written agreement of the charges and type of service they will offer.
