Most house clearance work in Billericay reaches us the same way. Someone has died or gone into care, the house has stood much as it was since the seventies, and a person who lives nowhere near CM11 or CM12 now has to empty it, sell it and be done with it. We have been clearing houses since 2007, and a fair few of them have been in this town. Here is one of ours, told properly, because one real day says more about a firm than any amount of promising.
A probate house clearance in CM12: the safe, the carpets and a clean-through
The instruction came from an executor service — a firm that does nothing but wind estates up — sitting the other side of Essex, a good hour away from Billericay. Nobody from that office was ever going to stand in the house. That is ordinary for us and it makes no difference to the day, provided the brief is written down before the van sets off.
This brief had four parts to it. Clear the house. Take the carpets up. Get the safe out. Clean through afterwards.
Three of those are the usual run of things. The safe is the part that changes how a team plans the morning. Safes are heavy out of all proportion to their size, they are often in the worst possible spot — a bedroom floor, the back of a fitted cupboard, the top of a staircase with a turn in it — and they are the one item nobody wants to improvise around. So it gets planned first and it comes out first, while there is still room to swing it and nothing else stacked in the hall. Everything else on a clearance can be worked round. A safe cannot.
The carpets were part of the instruction from the start, which is worth knowing, because carpets and underlay decide whether a house clearance finishes at four o'clock or half past five. Lifting them is quick in a bedroom and slow in a hall with a fitted stair runner. The written answer that went out to the instructing office before the day said it plainly: "There is no need to box or bag anything up, if you have taken out the property what you wish to keep or put to one side, the staff will clear everything from inside cupboards, wardrobes, drawers, they will take up carpets, underlay and gripper rods".
The only caveat we ever put on that is the gripper rods themselves. Where they have been nailed down over floorboards they come up with the carpet. Where somebody has pinned or glued them over tiles or a laid floor, they stay — pulling them lifts the surface underneath, and handing back a house with a wrecked hall floor helps nobody.
Then the clean. A clean-through is not part of a clearance by default; it is a separate thing you ask for, and it was asked for here. It matters most on exactly this sort of job, where the next person through the door is a valuer or a buyer rather than a member of the family, and where nobody local is going to come round afterwards with a mop.
That is the whole job, and it is a fairly typical Billericay one: an empty house, an instruction by email, a team who let themselves in, and a set of photographs at the end so that the people responsible could see the state it was left in without driving down.
Billericay, Wickford and the rest of the round
Billericay sits in the Basildon borough, in Essex, with CM11 and CM12 covering the town itself and the SS postcodes starting almost as soon as you drop south towards Wickford and Basildon proper. CM11 and CM12 are the districts this page is about, taking in Great Burstead, Little Burstead, South Green, Ramsden Heath and Stock out towards the lanes. Wickford, Basildon with Laindon and Pitsea, Ingatestone, Brentwood with Hutton, Ingrave and Herongate sit in their own districts beyond that, each with a page of its own rather than a claim on this one. If your road is signed off the High Street, the Radford Way estate roads, Laindon Road or Mountnessing Road, we know where we are going. Several of those neighbours have a page of their own: house clearance in Basildon for the big estates south of us, house clearance in Wickford for the smaller town down the line, and house clearance in Brentwood to the west. Same team, same vans, different sort of streets.
The station is the reason half of Billericay is the shape it is. It sits on the Shenfield to Southend line, a little over half an hour straight into Liverpool Street, and the streets nearest it are the tight interwar terraces and semis built for commuters, with a single kerb and no drive. Further out you get the postwar semis with garages, and further out still the big detached houses on plots where the shed and the greenhouse hold more than the house does. Three different sorts of clearance, really, on one town's worth of streets. The one thing they share is that the loft is never empty, whatever anyone tells us on the phone.
Access follows the same pattern. Round the station and the older terraces it is a question of where the van stands, and whether the neighbours' cars are out by nine. On the postwar estates there is usually a drive and it is straightforward. Out on the bigger plots the problem is distance rather than width — a long path, a side gate, and a shed at the bottom of the garden that everything has to be carried up from.
The kinds of house clearance we do in Billericay
Probate house clearance in Billericay
Most of what we do here is probate work. Executors, solicitors, estate administrators and probate firms instruct us direct, and a good share of them have never seen the house. A probate house clearance runs on written detail: what stays, what goes, who has already been through the drawers, whether jewellery, documents or photographs are still in the house, and who is to have anything found. Tell us that in an email and it happens; leave it unsaid and the team will stop and ring rather than guess. There is more on how we handle estate work on our probate house clearance page.
Flat clearance in CM11 and CM12
Flats are their own thing — a communal door, a lift that may or may not take a wardrobe, a bin store that is emphatically not ours to fill, and often a managing agent who wants notice before a van parks. Smaller than a house, and rarely quicker than one.
Garage and loft clearance in Billericay
A great many Billericay jobs are not the house at all. The house has been emptied by the family and what is left is the garage, the loft and the shed: tools, tins, timber offcuts, garden chairs, boxes that have not been opened since the last move. A loft with a fixed staircase and a working light knocks an hour off the day. A loft with a hatch and a ladder adds one.
End of tenancy clearance in Billericay
Landlords and letting agents call us when a tenancy has ended untidily and the place has to be turned round for the next let. Furniture, white goods, the contents of the cupboards, and the carpets if they have had it.
Hoarder house clearance in Billericay
Where things have built up over years and the hallway has narrowed to a single track, we treat it as ordinary work, because it is. Nobody comments and nobody makes a face. See hoarder house clearance for how those days are run. Stairlifts, mobility frames, hospital-style beds and hoists we take as a matter of course.
Keys, locked-up houses and nobody home
Plenty of Billericay houses are cleared by somebody who lives nowhere near Billericay. That is fine. We have done whole jobs on a posted key, and we keep the tracking for it.
What we would rather have before the day than on the day. Where the meter is, whether the front door sticks, which neighbour holds the spare, whether there is a second lock we are to leave alone, whether the van can get past the bend at the end of the road, and what is to happen to the key when we finish. Posted back, left with a neighbour, or dropped somewhere in the house. That is the level of detail worth putting in an email. We would sooner read it the week before than have two men stood on a pavement in CM12 ringing a mobile that is in a meeting.
What cannot go in an ordinary load, and why
Not everything in a house can travel in a mixed household load, and the reasons are regulatory rather than fussiness.
Upholstered furniture is the big one. Since 2023 sofas, armchairs, bed bases, dining and office chairs, padded headboards, footstools and the like are treated as POPs — persistent organic pollutants — because of the flame-retardant chemicals in the foam. They have to be kept separate from the general load, incinerated at a permitted facility, and documented separately at the transfer station. Fridges and freezers are hazardous waste in their own right and go down a separate route again. Paint is another: it does not go in a household load, it travels its own way with its own paperwork, and a garage with a lifetime of half-used tins in it is worth mentioning when you ring. Gas bottles, solvents and asbestos we cannot simply put in the van at all — say so on the phone and we will tell you what can be arranged.
Weight is the other honest limit. A tipper holds what it holds, and a garage full of tins and timber is heavier than it looks from the doorstep. If a house turns out to hold three loads where we expected two, you will hear it from the team leader while there is still time to talk about it, not afterwards.
Where it all ends up
Usable furniture, tools, crockery, books and clothing are offered to a reuse project or a charity shop in the area before anything else happens to them. What went out in writing to that CM12 instructing office is what we tell everybody: "Every item we clear from a property is taken to licensed recycling stations or where possible items will be donated to local charities if suitable, waste transfer notes can be provided upon request." Everything else goes to a permitted transfer station where it is weighed, sorted and recorded, and we can send you the waste transfer tickets. We are registered with the Environment Agency as an upper-tier waste carrier under CBDU419679, and we are insured both for the work and for the property while we are in it. If it is only a van-load of rubbish rather than a full house, that is our house rubbish removal side of things.
Getting a figure for house clearance in Billericay
Ring the office on 0800 046 5555 with your postcode and a room-by-room description, or send photographs of the worst room through the form on this page. Photographs are better than adjectives — the loft, the garage, the shed and the spare bedroom, in that order. You will get a figure and a date back, and one of our team leaders will walk the house on the day and photograph it before and after.
House clearance in Billericay: questions we get asked
Do you cover the whole of CM11 and CM12?
Yes, the town and the villages either side of it, and on into Wickford and Basildon in the SS districts as described above.
Can you clear a house if nobody can be there?
Yes. We work regularly on a posted key, with written instructions and photographs at the end. Tell us in advance where the key is to go when we have finished.
Can you take instructions from a solicitor or an executor?
Yes — a good share of our Billericay work is probate work instructed by solicitors, probate firms and executors who live in another county entirely. We invoice the solicitor, the trustee or the executor direct, and the work can be paid out of the estate.
How long does a clearance take?
The team arrives at nine and most houses are done inside the day. Lofts, garages, full sheds and carpets are what stretch it, and a very full house may take a second day.
Will you take carpets and underlay up?
Yes, along with the gripper rods where they have been laid over floorboards. Where rods have been fixed over tiles or a laid floor they stay put, because removing them damages the floor underneath.
What can't you take away?
Gas bottles, solvents and asbestos cannot go in an ordinary load. Paint, fridges, freezers and upholstered POPs furniture we do take, but they travel separately under the regulations — mention them when you ring so the day is planned around them.
