Home renovations can not only transform your day-to-day living space for the better, giving your home a new lease of life but they can also add significant value to your property. Whether you’re converting loft space to create an extra room, replacing that 1970s avocado bathroom suite or giving your kitchen a much-needed facelift, there’s a great deal of pride and satisfaction to be taken from successfully completing your own home renovation projects.
However, home renovations create lots of waste material which needs to be disposed of responsibly and ethically. So how do you collect and get rid of those old kitchen cabinets, bathroom fixtures and fittings or boxes of junk that have been gathering dust in the attic for years?
Depending upon the scale of your home renovation project, cost is likely to be a major concern. There is also the practicality of where you are going to store all of the messy and possibly cumbersome waste material that your home renovation produces.
Transporting your own waste to the nearest recycling centre is both impractical and time consuming; if you only have a car and you’re replacing a bathroom suite you’re likely to have to incur the expense and inconvenience of hiring a van just to dispose of your old bath. Of course, you could hire a man-with-a-van to collect and dispose of all of your home renovation waste, but again your reliant upon their availability and reliability, and if your waste is of sufficient volume that it requires several trips to dispose of, you may be looking at significant costs again.
The practical and cost-effective way in which to deal with waste from house renovations is to hire a skip. Arranging skip hire is quick and easy. All you have to do is decide how large a skip you need and how long you’ll need it for, contact a local licenced skip hire operator (your local authority can advise you of licenced skip hire companies in your area) and give them your details.
Your skip will normally be delivered within 24 hours, and sometimes even the same day, leaving you free to concentrate on your home renovation whilst having somewhere convenient to dump any messy waste materials as and when they’re produced. Once your home renovation project is finished, you simply call your skip hire company and they’ll collect your skip and dispose of the contents responsibly.
Skips come in a range of sizes from Mini Skips with a 2 cubic yard capacity to Maxi Skips which provide 12 cubic yards of space and can cope with the largest home renovation job. If available space for a skip is an issue, you might even consider hiring one or more skip bags. These industrial-strength plastic sacks are delivered flat-packed but unfold to a capacity of 1 cubic yard.
Whilst hiring a skip is undoubtedly the best method for dealing with home renovation waste, there are a couple of points to bear in mind. Firstly, if your skip partially or fully stands on a public highway (pavement, road or verge) you will need to obtain a skip permit from your local authority. This is not a major job, and some skip hire companies will arrange it for you.
You must not place any items that are deemed hazardous in your skip – this is particularly relevant if your home renovation involves the removal of any asbestos which will require specialist disposal. Also for health and safety reasons, your skip must be loaded levelly; overfilling a skip is illegal. You must also take care to ensure that no items protrude dangerously from your skip.
Finally, it’s worth hiring a skip slightly larger than you think you’ll need and it’s also sensible to hire your skip for one day more than you think your home renovation project will take to complete; this should cover you should any unforeseen problems arise.
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