Getting a Company vs Doing it Yourself
Posted on 28/10/2020
How to Know When Getting a Company or Doing It Yourself
A house clearance, depending on your circumstances can be an incredibly private and personal thing or it might be that you never want to go anywhere near the contents of that house again or at all. Therefore, there are already arguments for and against doing the whole clearance yourself or getting a company to come and do it for you.
Here are just some of those arguments:
Experience: Inevitably a house clearance company which specialises in house clearances all day, every day is inevitably going to have much more experience in the ins and outs of a typical house clearance. Any hiccoughs that you encounter have probably been encountered by the company before and they will have a system for dealing with them. There are only so many things that beginners luck can really help with.
What You Want: You can give a company very specific instructions on what you want from the house clearance and what should be done with all the things once they have been cleared. However, they may have their own policies that govern these things and your words will fall on deaf ears. If you do it yourself then it can all be run and played out exactly as you want it to.
Treasures: You can go through a house as many times as you like before it is officially cleared, especially if it belonged to a deceased loved one, to find all the sentimental treasures that you want to hold onto. However, it’s sods law that something will get left behind or forgotten or perhaps there’s something that you know should be there but you just can’t find it. In situations like this then making sure you are clearing the property yourself will ensure that no stone is left unturned. The counter argument to this might be that you convince yourself that you need far more of the contents of the house than you actually do. If a company does it all then you don’t have to decide at all.
Costs: With a company everything is included in the price and you pay the flat fee that they quote and everything is taken care of. If you are doing it yourself then you have to pay for the skip hire and the van hire for bulkier items, you have to transport everything to the skip or the charity shop yourself and you will probably find that you don’t have the expertise to pack it all to make best use of the transport space available to you.
Sale: In a similar way to costs, if there are things in the house clearance that you think you could probably sell for a profit and make something from the house clearance then all the responsibility of selling passes to you and you have to make arrangements yourself. A company will have enough experience to know what is likely to sell and what isn’t. They also take care of the sales for you. However, unless you make an awful lot of money, it’s unlikely you’ll really reap the benefits because each sale would probably have a cut taken from it by the company and they’ll reimburse themselves before paying anything out to you. A sale will probably just reverse the flat fee they get from you for the house clearance.
It might not have helped any decision making but hopefully, these arguments have opened your mind a little and give you some ideas for the advantages and disadvantages of using and not using a professional house clearance company.
