What happens to the things you cannot keep

Most of it is not rubbish

The word “clearance” makes it sound as though a house is emptied into a skip. In practice a reasonable firm sorts as it goes, and a great deal of a house has somewhere better to be.

Roughly, in the order most firms work through it:

• Resale. Furniture in good condition, tools, china, books with a market, anything with an identifiable value. This is what allows some firms to quote lower than others.
• Charity. Usable items that will not fetch enough to be worth reselling.
• Recycling. Metals, cardboard, textiles, electricals, and increasingly furniture that can be broken down.
• Disposal. What is left, which on an ordinary house is far less than people expect.

If the estate is being valued, the resale category is the one to hold back until somebody has looked at it. See what has to wait for probate.

What charities will and will not take

Most large charities collect furniture free, and several run their own vans specifically for house clearances. British Heart Foundation, Sue Ryder, Emmaus, the Salvation Army and most local hospices all do it, and a local furniture reuse project will often take things the national charities will not.

What they generally will take: sofas and armchairs with fire labels, dining furniture, wardrobes and chests, working white goods, books, bric-a-brac, unopened toiletries, clean bedding.

What they generally will not: anything broken, anything upholstered without its fire label, mattresses, flat-pack furniture that has been assembled once, older electricals that would fail a test, cots and car seats, and opened medicines.

Book collections early. A charity van may be three weeks out, and that is three weeks in which the furniture has to stay in the house.

The fire label problem

This one accounts for more usable furniture going to waste than any other single cause, so it is worth a section.

Upholstered furniture sold in the UK has to carry a permanent fire safety label. Charities and second-hand dealers cannot lawfully pass on an upholstered item without it. The label is usually a white or grey tag stitched under a seat cushion, on the underside of the frame, or along the back edge of a mattress.

Check before you offer something. If the label has been cut off, which people do because they find them irritating, the sofa is legally unsellable and unsaleable however good it looks. It becomes bulky waste.

There is no way round this and a firm telling you otherwise is not one to use.

Things with their own rules

A few categories cannot go in a general load:

• Fridges and freezers. The refrigerant has to be recovered, so they are handled separately and usually carry a per-item charge.
• Mattresses. Accepted almost everywhere but charged for at most transfer stations.
• Paint, solvents, chemicals, gas bottles. Hazardous. Most clearance firms will not take them, and your council’s household waste site will, usually free and often by appointment.
• Asbestos. Anything from a garage roof, an old airing cupboard or textured ceiling coating needs a specialist. Do not put it in a general clearance and do not let anybody tell you it is fine.
• Medicines. Back to a pharmacy, which will dispose of them properly and free.
• Electricals. Recyclable through specific routes, and many are worth something.
• Firearms, ammunition and anything that looks like ordnance. Police, not a clearance firm. This is more common in an older person’s house than you would expect, particularly medals and war souvenirs.

What you can ask a firm

Ask where things go. It is a fair question and the answer tells you a great deal.

A firm that sorts will describe its routes without hesitation: which charity it works with, where it takes metals, what it resells and through what channel. A firm that takes everything to a transfer station and charges you by weight will be vaguer, and that is useful information rather than a scandal. Both models exist and both are lawful. They just cost different amounts and produce different outcomes.

Two things worth asking for specifically:

A note of what was taken. You are not legally required to have one for household waste, but for an estate it is the record of what left the property. See waste transfer notes.

Their waste carrier registration number, before anything moves. Check it. If the contents are later fly-tipped, the duty of care follows the person who produced the waste, and for an estate clearance that is the estate.

The part that is genuinely waste

Some of it is just waste, and there is no better answer for it: worn textiles that cannot be recycled, broken chipboard furniture, old carpet, plaster, the accumulated contents of a shed.

That fraction is what a clearance quote is really pricing, because transfer stations charge by weight and that is the cost a firm cannot avoid. It is also why a quote well below everybody else’s is worth a question. The waste has to go somewhere, and if the price does not cover disposal then either the contents are unusually valuable or the disposal is not happening properly.

There is one genuinely good version of this. A house with real resale value in it can be cleared cheaply, or occasionally free, because the firm expects to make its money on the contents. That is a reasonable deal as long as it is the deal you meant to make, and as long as somebody has established what the contents are worth before they leave.