We have been doing house clearance in Hatfield since 2007, and a good half of it is arranged by somebody who is nowhere near the town. Here is one of them. The fridge freezer was the last thing onto the van. AL9, a Monday morning in June, one load, and the man who booked it wasn't in Hertfordshire at all. He was over in Buckinghamshire and had sorted the whole job by phone and email without seeing us once.
We let ourselves in, emptied the rooms, kept the fridge freezer back so it could go off on its own route rather than sit in with the general load, and sent him the photographs and the paperwork that evening. "Thank you for the invoice. I am very satisfied with the work that was carried out," he replied. That is the shape of a good half of what we do around Hatfield. Somebody a long way off, a house that has to be empty by a certain date, and no appetite for driving down the A1(M) six weekends running to shift it in car boot loads.
Not every one goes in a day, mind. Some houses have thirty years in the loft and a garage nobody has opened since the car stopped fitting in it.
Where we go from here
Hatfield sits in the AL postcodes. The town splits roughly between AL9 up by the old village and the park, and AL10 across the new town, Birchwood, South Hatfield, Roe Green, Hatfield Garden Village, Ellenbrook and the estates off Bishops Rise, with North Mymms, Lemsford and Digswell just beyond. We are in and out of both regularly, along with AL6 at Welwyn, AL7 and AL8 in Welwyn Garden City, AL3 and AL4 towards St Albans, Wheathampstead and Marshalswick. It is all Welwyn Hatfield or its immediate neighbours, all Hertfordshire, all within about half an hour of each other on a decent morning. Brookmans Park, Essendon, Welham Green, Newgate Street, Potters Bar and Hertford come up often enough that the crews know the lanes. Bin collections and the household waste sites are split between Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council and Hertfordshire County Council, which catches people out when they ring the wrong one about a sofa.
If the house is a few miles off, it probably has a page of its own. house clearance in St Albans for that side of the county, house clearance in Potters Bar down towards the M25, house clearance in Hertford east of us, and house clearance in Welwyn for the villages just up the road. Ring 0800 046 5555 if you are not sure which one you are in — it takes ten seconds to work out from the postcode.
If you are meeting us and coming in by train, Hatfield station on the Great Northern line out of King's Cross is a five-minute walk from most of Old Hatfield. Welwyn Garden City is the next stop up if that suits better.
The kinds of house clearance we do in Hatfield
Probate house clearance in Hatfield
Most of the work here is probate. A house sits empty while the paperwork goes through, the family are three counties away, and at some point the agent wants it presentable or the solicitor wants it dealt with before completion. Probate clearances are rarely urgent in the week you first ring; they become urgent about six weeks later, all at once, and that is the point at which people start phoning round.
We can invoice the solicitor, the executor or the estate directly. Payment can come straight out of the estate rather than anyone's own pocket, we do not ask for a deposit, and the invoice goes out after the work is finished, not before it starts. If the executor is at a distance we work off keys from an agent, ring through at the start and the end of the day. Send photographs of each room as it empties so nobody has to drive down to check. Where a clearance needs a written list of what is to stay — the fitted wardrobes, the curtains, a stair lift on loan from the local authority that its owner will collect — we work off that list and stick to it. There is more on our probate house clearance page, and the same applies whether the house is in AL9 or AL10.
Flat clearance and end of tenancy clearance in AL10
The new town side of Hatfield is full of maisonettes, first-floor flats and postwar blocks, plus a lot of let property near the university. End of tenancy clearances there are usually small and awkward rather than big and awkward. One flight of stairs, a communal door that closes itself, a parking bay that belongs to somebody else, and a deadline set by the inventory clerk rather than by anyone in the family. We would rather come early on those and be off the estate before the school run.
Garage and loft clearance in Hatfield
Garage and loft clearance is the half of the job people forget when they describe the house down the phone. On the semis and the bigger detached places, the loft is boarded and full, the garage has not held a car since the eighties, and there is a shed behind it with tins, tools and a mower in it. All of that comes out on the same day if we know about it in advance, and it changes how many people we send. Tell us it is there. It is much worse to find it at eleven o'clock.
Access, parking and the awkward bits
Old Hatfield is the fiddly half. The lanes climbing up from the station towards the church are narrow, some of it is cobbled, and a Luton with the tail lift down takes up more of the road than anyone would like. We plan those ones for an early start and keep the walk from van to door as short as we can manage. The new town is easier for the vehicle but harder for the stairs — plenty of maisonettes and first-floor flats where everything comes down one flight and out through a communal door that likes to close itself. On the postwar semis and the bigger detached houses out towards the business park and Ellenbrook, parking is rarely the problem; a drive that takes two vehicles is worth an hour of anyone's day.
Tell us in advance about anything with a suspension order, a permit bay or a barrier and we'll work around it. Tell us about the stairs too. It changes the number of people we send.
What happens to the contents
The sorting starts on the van, not at the tip. Furniture that somebody else would happily use, working white goods, books, tools, crockery. Those we try to route into reuse locally rather than tip them, and Hertfordshire has a decent spread of charity warehouses and community projects that take furniture with a bit of life left in it. What genuinely cannot be reused goes to a permitted transfer station where it is weighed, split into streams and receipted. We carry waste under Environment Agency registration CBDU419679, and the paperwork for your load exists if you ever want to see it.
Some things ride separately. Sofas, armchairs, padded headboards, footstools and garden furniture cushions are treated as POP items under the persistent organic pollutant rules, which means the foam cannot be mixed into a general load and has to be handled in its own regulated stream. Fridges and freezers need their gas taken out under controlled conditions — that is why one was held back off the van on the AL9 job above. Mattresses are shredded rather than buried. And there are things we simply are not permitted to put on an ordinary house clearance van: asbestos sheeting, gas cylinders, car batteries, oil drums. Half-used tins of paint we can take, but liquid paint has to go to a licensed chemical facility rather than in with the household load.
Asking us what a house clearance in Hatfield will come to
There is one way to get a figure and it is not a table on a web page. Ring the office on 0800 046 5555, or send photographs through the form on this page. A shot of each room, the loft hatch, the garage and the shed is plenty — and you will get a figure back for your house rather than for a house of that size in general. It costs nothing to ask and it commits you to nothing.
What we need to know is the postcode district, the number of bedrooms, whether the loft, garage, shed and garden are in scope, whether there are white goods, and roughly how many sofas, armchairs and mattresses there are. That is enough. If two of us have to walk round it first because the access is odd or the house is a heavy one, we will say so and come and look.
Setting a date
Clearances start at 9am. Most Hatfield houses are done and swept by mid-afternoon, and if the job needs a second day we'd rather tell you at half past nine on the first than at four o'clock. We can hold keys, meet an agent, or work with a neighbour holding the spare set — that is normal here, given how much of the house clearance work in Hatfield is booked from another county.
Questions we get asked about house clearance in Hatfield
Can you invoice our solicitor? Yes. On a probate house clearance we invoice the solicitor, the executor or the estate directly, and the family never has to handle it. There is no deposit and nothing is paid up front.
Can it be paid out of the estate? It can. That is the usual arrangement on probate work, and it is why we send the invoice, the waste transfer paperwork and the photographs together — the executor needs all three for the estate file.
Do we have to be there? No. Plenty of the houses we clear in AL9 and AL10 are done on keys, with photographs at the end. If you want to be there for the first half hour to point at what stays, that works too.
What won't you take? Asbestos, gas cylinders, car batteries and oil drums stay put, and we will tell you who does handle them. Upholstery, fridges, freezers and mattresses we do take, but they travel in their own streams because the rules require it.
How much notice do you need? A few days is usually enough for a standard house clearance in Hatfield, longer in the busy weeks when several estates complete at once. If you have a completion date, tell us the date first — we will work backwards from it.
