Most house clearance in Launceston starts the same way. A phone call, a handful of photographs, a walk round on the morning itself — and it finishes with an empty house and a set of pictures emailed back to whoever is dealing with the estate. Here is one of ours, told the way it happened.
Two framed pictures had to stay on the wall. So did the television, which was bracketed above the fireplace and had been left out of the job on purpose. Everything else in that house went — a fridge freezer and a smaller under-counter one, a mattress, a monitor, a POP-rated three-piece suite, and the contents of every cupboard and drawer in a three-bedroom place. Two to three loads was the estimate the team leader gave after his walk round, and he gave it with the caveat he always gives. Not everything can be seen or assessed from pictures, and unseen areas, hidden items or the weight of the loads can change it. One day on site, clearance and a clean at the end. The instruction came through a solicitor acting for the estate rather than from any family member, which is how a good half of this work reaches us.
It wasn't a flawless day, and there's no point pretending otherwise. A gas fire had been carried out and stood at the front of the property instead of being taken away on the load, and the person handling the estate wrote to us afterwards: "Good morning I have just been informed that a gas fire had been left out the front of property and also did the cleaning get done pictures I have been sent look like it hasn't thank you". Fair question.
We went back through the completed photographs with the crew, found a door frame they'd missed, and sorted the fire. We also had to say plainly what the clean does and doesn't cover. The insides of white goods, ovens, drawers and cupboards are not part of our standard cleaning service — and that some stains on the laminate weren't going to come up whatever we did. A box of keys was left on the side for whoever came next.
That is roughly how a house clearance goes when it's done properly: the estimate, the walk round, the photos afterwards, and somebody willing to answer for the bits that went wrong.
What comes out of a Launceston house, and where it ends up
Launceston houses are not all one thing. Inside the old walls you get slate-roofed terraces off Castle Street and Southgate, stairs that turn twice, and doorways that were built before anyone imagined a three-seater sofa. Out at Newport and the streets behind it there are post-war semis and bungalows with garages. Past the town boundary you're into granite farmhouses and barn conversions where the real work is in the outbuildings rather than the house. The PL15 district reaches a good way out. Tregadillett, Egloskerry, South Petherwin, Lewannick, Altarnun, Polyphant and the scatter of farms up towards Five Lanes and the edge of the moor. And a house clearance Launceston side of the border often means a lane, a gate and a turning circle before it means a single box.
Anything still usable we offer to a reuse project or a charity depot before it goes anywhere near a skip — furniture, crockery, tools, books, garden gear. Beds and sofas are a different matter, because upholstered furniture containing persistent organic pollutants has to be kept apart from general waste and incinerated under its own set of rules. Those come off the van separately. Fridges and freezers go for degassing. Televisions and monitors go through the WEEE stream. What's genuinely dead goes to a permitted transfer station and comes back to us as a weighed ticket with a waste transfer note attached. Our carrier registration with the Environment Agency is CBDU419679 and we'll put the number on paperwork for any executor or agent who wants it on file.
Paint tins, gas cylinders, asbestos sheeting off an old shed roof, drums of chemicals from a farm building — none of that travels in a mixed load. We'll tell you on the phone what needs a specialist and what Cornwall Council's household waste recycling centre on the Pennygillam estate will accept from a resident.
The access question
Launceston is built on a hill, and that shapes the day more than the contents do. The steep drop from the castle down towards the Kensey, the narrow way through Southgate arch, the double yellows through the town centre. The crew work out the loading position before anything moves, and if the nearest legal spot is fifty yards off we walk it rather than risk a ticket on the customer's account.
One customer sending us details ahead of a job put it plainly in her email: "There is room on the front drive to park a van." That single line saves an hour. She also asked for a specific route — in through the internal garage, then the kitchen and utility, "to avoid dirtying the clean carpets" — and that's exactly what the team did. Tell us that sort of thing beforehand and it gets written on the job sheet. The A30 runs along the top of the town, which puts most of the area we cover within a comfortable run. Launceston has no mainline platform of its own these days — the Launceston Steam Railway along the Kensey valley is a narrow-gauge heritage line, lovely, but it won't carry a sofa. The nearest working station is Gunnislake on the Tamar Valley line, with Bodmin Parkway the usual choice for anyone travelling down from up-country to meet us at a property.
The order of a day rarely changes. The van is in by half eight if the lane allows it, the team leader walks every room with whoever holds the keys, anything that stays is marked or moved to one room. Then it's ground floor first, loft last, because the loft is where the surprises live. Rooms are photographed empty as they're finished, not all at the end.
The wider PL, EX and TR run
Launceston sits in the PL15 district, right on the Devon border, with PL16 around Lifton just over the Tamar, EX23 up at Bude, PL17 at Callington and PL18 at Gunnislake and Calstock. Okehampton and the EX20 villages are the same run for us up the A30. From the same yard we cover Camelford, Delabole, Tintagel and Boscastle on the north coast in PL32 to PL35, Bodmin and Lostwithiel, Wadebridge, Padstow and Port Isaac, Liskeard and Looe, Saltash and Torpoint, then down through St Austell, Par and Fowey, St Columb and Newquay. On into the TR postcodes for Truro, St Agnes, Perranporth, Penryn, Falmouth, Helston, Camborne and Redruth, Hayle, St Ives, Marazion and Penzance. Cornwall Council covers all of it bar the Devon side of the Tamar, where it's Devon County Council.
Several of those places have their own pages, and if your property is nearer to them than to us here, start there instead. house clearance in Bodmin for the A30 and A389 side, house clearance in Liskeard for the south-east of the county, house clearance in Wadebridge for the Camel estuary villages. house clearance in Cornwall covers the county as a whole.
Probate work and executors who live a long way off
A lot of what we do in this corner of Cornwall is probate work, and the person instructing us is often three or four counties away. That is fine. Keys get posted to us by Special Delivery and posted back afterwards, tracked, with the receipt kept. We photograph every room when it's empty and email the set through the same day. If you want the electric and gas readings taken while the crew are there. And plenty of executors do, because it saves a two-hundred-mile round trip for a number written on a meter — say so when you book and the team leader will note them down.
On the paperwork side, we invoice the solicitor, the executor or the administrator directly, and payment can come from the estate rather than out of anybody's own pocket. There is no deposit. The estimate is free and it doesn't commit you to anything. That arrangement covers most probate house clearance Launceston executors ask us about, and it's the same whether the property is in the town or out on a farm lane. How a probate clearance runs from the first call to the final photographs doesn't change much from one estate to the next, and we'll talk it through on the phone if you've never had to arrange one.
Two-day jobs happen, and they're usually decided by things outside the house. Where the van can sit, how long the weighbridge queue is at the tip, whether the charity depot can take a van-load of furniture that afternoon or wants it booked in for the Thursday. We flag all three when we give the estimate rather than after. Executors dealing with a house at a distance also tend to ask about the garden, the shed and the garage. The honest answer is that those are usually what turns a one-day house clearance in Launceston into two.
What it costs, hoarder house clearance, and the ones nobody else wants
A hoarder house clearance is ordinary work here, not a special case, and nobody in the van passes comment. Garage and loft clearance is the other half of it. Out in the PL15 lanes the outbuildings and the loft hold more than the rooms do, and a garage and loft on their own is a job we will book without the house. Ring the office on 0800 046 5555, or send photographs through the form on this page, and you'll get a figure back. That's the whole answer. Nobody can tell you anything useful about a house clearance in Launceston from a description alone, and we'd rather look at pictures of the loft and the garage than guess.
Houses that have filled up over twenty or thirty years. Floor to ceiling, doors that only open halfway, a loft nobody has been into since the eighties — are ordinary work for us, not a reason for a raised eyebrow. The crew clear them the same way they clear a two-bed bungalow, sorting as they go, and keeping an eye out for the money and documents that turn up more often than people expect. Nobody comments on the state of the place, on the day or afterwards.
We've been at this since 2007, and the same crew do the awkward ones. A garage with a hole in the roof, an outbuilding stuffed with forty years of farm oddments, a bungalow where the back door hasn't opened in a decade. If something has to stay — the wall-mounted telly, the pictures, a carpet, a set of light fittings — say so at the walk round and it gets marked before anything moves.
Common questions about house clearance in Launceston
Can you invoice a solicitor or executor for a probate house clearance? Yes. We invoice the solicitor, the executor or the administrator directly, payment can come from the estate, and there's no deposit to find up front.
Do you cover the villages as well as the town? Yes. The whole PL15 district, from the streets under the castle out to Tregadillett, Egloskerry, South Petherwin, Lewannick, Altarnun and the farms towards the edge of the moor.
What can't go on the van? Paint, gas cylinders, chemical drums and anything with asbestos in it. Fridges, freezers, mattresses and POP-rated upholstery all travel, but they're handled and disposed of under their own rules rather than in a mixed load.
Do I have to be there on the day? No. Plenty of our estate clearances are done with keys posted to us and posted back tracked afterwards, with photographs of every empty room emailed the same day.
How soon can you come? Usually within the week for a standard house clearance Launceston side, sooner if a completion date is pressing. Tell us the deadline when you ring and we'll say straight away whether we can meet it.
Ring us on 0800 046 5555 with the postcode, the number of bedrooms and a handful of photographs, and say what has to stay — the wall-mounted telly, the pictures, the washing machine, whatever it is. We'll tell you what the day looks like for your house clearance in Launceston before you commit to anything.
