House clearance in Greenford is a steady part of our week, and has been for years. This end of the borough of Ealing — Middlesex, before the county went — sends us more full houses than anywhere else on our side of the A40. Most of the work is ordinary and quiet: a whole house one day, a loft and a garage the next, a single wardrobe carried down a communal stair the day after. Here is one of ours, told properly.
The fifth of October 2020, a house in UB6. Whoever was organising it was not local — the paperwork went to an address up in the West Midlands. Tells you most of what you need to know about the job: somebody a long way up the motorway trying to get a Greenford house emptied without booking a week off work. It went in a single day. Two van loads, the second straight after the first, out to the transfer station and back again before the light went. An undercounter fridge and an undercounter freezer came out of the kitchen and travelled separately from everything else, because by law they have to. Two mattresses came down the stairs. The rest was a house's worth of ordinary household contents, sorted on the way out into what somebody else could still use and what nobody could. The residue going through the regulated recycling and disposal route and tickets issued to prove it.
Two loads in one day is the part worth repeating. A house lived in for decades rarely fits in a van once. The honest thing is to say so at the start rather than leave half of it standing in the hall at four o'clock and book a second date. If a house clearance in Greenford is going to need the van tipped and brought back, you hear it from us before we start, not afterwards.
Sorting, reuse and the transfer station
Not much of a full house goes straight in a van and straight in a hole. Furniture that somebody else would happily live with — dining chairs, wardrobes that come apart cleanly, decent white goods, boxed crockery — gets offered to charity shops and community reuse projects around Ealing before anything else happens to it. Metal is pulled off for scrap, cardboard and paper go one way, timber another. What genuinely cannot be reused is tipped at a licensed transfer station and weighed in, with paperwork issued for each load. We hold waste carrier licence CBDU419679, and if you ever want to see where your father's shed contents actually went, you can ask and we will show you the tickets.
Sofas, armchairs, footstools and mattresses are treated differently now. Upholstered furniture containing persistent organic pollutants in the foam and fire retardants must be kept apart from general waste and burned in a permitted facility. It cannot be crushed in with the rest. That is why an armchair is handled on its own rather than tipped in with the load. Why the two mattresses off that UB6 job travelled the way they did. Same principle with fridges and freezers, which are classed as hazardous because of the refrigerant gas. The undercounter pair out of that kitchen went out of the house apart from everything else and were booked in accordingly. Paint, aerosols, gas bottles, car batteries and anything with a hazard diamond on the label sit outside an ordinary mixed load. Tell us on the phone and we will deal with them properly instead of pretending they are not there.
What a house clearance in Greenford costs, and who we invoice
Ring the office on 0800 046 5555 and describe it, or send photographs or a phone video through the form on this page. You will get a figure back. That is the whole of what we can usefully put in writing about cost: no two houses in Greenford hold the same amount. A page that throws numbers at you before anybody has looked in the loft is guessing. The estimate is free and it commits you to nothing.
Where the clearance is part of an estate, we invoice the solicitor, the executor or the estate directly. You do not have to put it on a personal card and claim it back from your brothers and sisters later. Payment can come out of the estate, and solicitors handling probate deal with us that way all the time. There is no deposit. The invoice follows the work, once the rooms are empty and somebody has walked round them.
Probate house clearance in Greenford
A fair share of the house clearance Greenford asks us for is probate work. It tends to arrive exactly the way that UB6 job did: from somebody who does not live here. An executor in another county, a son or daughter who moved away thirty years ago, occasionally a solicitor ringing on behalf of both. We are used to it. Keys can come from an agent, a neighbour or a key safe. We will photograph the rooms before we touch anything and send the pictures over, so the person in charge can see what they are agreeing to from wherever they are.
Probate has its own pace and it is not ours to rush. Grant not through yet, a valuation still to be done, one relative who wants to walk round first. All normal, and all easier if you tell us at the booking stage. Anything that looks like documents, jewellery, coins, medals, war papers or cash is set aside in a box and handed over rather than judged by us on the day. If a room has to stay untouched until somebody has been, it stays untouched. There is more on how we handle estate work on our probate house clearance page, and it applies here without change.
Getting a van in around Greenford
Greenford sits in the London Borough of Ealing, in the UB6 postcode district. It shares with Perivale next door, with Northolt and UB5 to the north-west, Southall and the UB1 and UB2 streets to the south, Hanwell in W7 to the south-east and Ealing itself in W5 and W13 beyond that. Hanger Lane, North Ealing, Pitshanger and Ealing Common are all inside the same half hour, Alperton and North Wembley sit over the HA0 line. Norwood Green and Yeading are the same run west. NW10 and Park Royal are a short drive up the Western Avenue. Greenford station, where the Central line meets the little National Rail branch down to West Ealing, is the marker most people give us when they are describing where a property is, along with the Broadway and the Grand Union Canal cutting across the south of the town.
There is a second district with a Greenford address on it, UB18. It is worth a sentence because it catches people out: nobody lives in it. UB18 is a non-geographic, large-user code held by a single business address in the town. No streets, no houses, no lofts. If your post arrives at UB18 you are a company post room, not a household. Every residential house clearance in Greenford we do is a UB6 job. That is the district to give us when you ring.
We cross the boundary in both directions on the same day, so the neighbouring towns are no trouble: house clearance in Northolt just over the UB5 line, house clearance in Southall down past the canal, and house clearance in Ealing for the bigger streets to the east. Each has its own page with its own jobs on it. Garage and loft clearance in Greenford is a booking in its own right. On these estates it is one of the commonest calls we get.
Access here varies more than you would guess for one small place. The interwar semis off the Ruislip Road and around Greenford Broadway usually have a driveway or at least a wide kerb. A tipper can sit outside without a fuss. The flats above the shops are another matter: one narrow stair, a landing you cannot swing a wardrobe on. A loading bay outside with fifteen minutes on it. The newer blocks near the canal and towards Perivale have parking that belongs to residents and a barrier that somebody has to lift for us. If your street has a controlled parking zone and no realistic spot for a large van, say so when you book. Ealing will suspend bays on application, and knowing that in advance is the difference between a clean day and two hours of shuttling boxes down the pavement.
Lofts and garages are the other Greenford speciality. Many of the interwar streets here have garages in a rear block. Those get opened maybe once a decade, and the contents of those blocks have kept us busy for years. Ladders, a lawnmower nobody has started since the last owner, tins of something, a bike frame, the boxes that came out of a loft in 1998 and were never opened again. Tell us on the phone whether the garage and the loft are in. They change the shape of the day more than the number of bedrooms does.
Hoarder house clearance in Greenford: full houses, difficult houses, storage units
Some properties are simply overfull. Rooms you can only stand in the doorway of, a hallway with a path through it, a kitchen that has stopped being a kitchen. We do a fair number of those and we do them quietly. No comments, no faces pulled, no photographs on anybody's social media. Valuables surface constantly in that kind of clearance, so the team sets aside anything that looks like documents, jewellery, coins or cash and hands it over rather than making a decision about it.
An empty house takes people differently, and it is often the last hour of the day that lands rather than the first. One customer wrote to us afterwards: "I've never seen the house empty before."
The work is not always a house, either. One customer we cleared a property for came back the following year to ask whether we would empty a self-storage unit as well, having assumed it was outside what we did. It is not — lock-ups, garages, offices, single rooms and part-loads all get the same van and the same paperwork.
What we need from you to book
Ring or email with the rough shape of it: which part of Greenford, Northolt, Southall or Perivale the property is in, how many bedrooms, whether the loft and garage are involved, what stays and what goes. Whether a van can get near the door. Photographs or a phone video are worth more than a paragraph of description. You will get a written figure before anybody books a date. Nothing is payable until the work is finished and you have walked round the empty rooms yourself.
Common questions about house clearance in Greenford
Can you invoice the solicitor, or can it be paid from the estate? Yes to both. On probate work we invoice the solicitor, the executor or the estate directly. Payment can come out of the estate rather than anybody's own pocket. There is no deposit and the invoice comes after the work, not before it.
How much will my house clearance in Greenford be? Ring 0800 046 5555 or send photographs through the form on this page and you will get a figure. We will not put one on a web page, because we would be inventing it.
Do you clear the whole house, or can you leave things? Either. Tell us on the day, or write it down beforehand. Carpets to stay, curtains to stay, the shed untouched, one bedroom locked until a relative has been. It is a common instruction and nobody minds.
What can't go in the van? Anything with a hazard diamond, gas bottles, car batteries, paint and aerosols, asbestos sheeting, and clinical waste. Fridges, freezers and upholstered furniture can go, but they are separated out and handled under their own rules rather than mixed into a general load. Say what you have when you ring and none of it is a problem.
Do I need to be there? No. Plenty of our Greenford work is done with a key from an agent or a neighbour, photographs sent through as we go, and a call at the end. Executors living in another county do it that way most of the time.
Which parts of Greenford do you cover? All of UB6, which means Greenford and Perivale. The streets either side of the boundary in Northolt, Southall, Hanwell and Ealing. UB18 is a large-user code with no housing in it, so it never comes up.
Abacus has been clearing houses across west London since 2007, fully insured, with every load documented. Ring 0800 046 5555 or send us the pictures. That is the whole offer.
