Nine days. Fourteen loads. That was our biggest house clearance in Corsham to date. A property out at Box, on the Bath side of the town in the SN13 district — and it remains the largest single clearance we've run anywhere in west Wiltshire. Most house clearance work here is nothing like that size, but it's the job worth telling, because just about everything that can complicate a clearance turned up in the one house.
It started in March 2023 with a video walk-through and a wildly optimistic idea of what was inside. The video showed what looked like a corridor. When the team got in, the corridor turned out to be a middle room, packed to shoulder height, with a doorway behind it nobody had spotted. Before any of that, though, we had to get to the front door at all. The garden had grown across the access, so day one was a cut-back team and a full load of green waste and rubbish out of the plot before a single item of furniture moved. Two loads came out of that garden in the end.
Day three is the one the crew still talk about. One of the lads was shifting a sideboard in the front living room and the floorboards gave way under him. No injuries, thankfully, but the floor was completely rotten and we stopped and told the instructing office the same afternoon, because that changes how you work a room. You stay near the joists, you carry lighter, and you don't stack anything you've cleared back onto the floor while you sort it. The property was also verminous, so the crew worked in full PPE with the windows and doors open throughout, and everything soft was bagged where it stood rather than carried loose through the house.
By the end of the third day we'd done four loads and cleared exactly two rooms. The honest estimate that went back was another ten or eleven loads and six more days, and we said plainly that it could move again. In a house like that, every item you shift reveals two more behind it, and there were rooms nobody had properly seen yet. Including a downstairs bathroom, which we only found once enough had come out to open the door. The reply from the instructing office was short: "Thanks for the below. Happy for you to proceed."
Then the diary got tangled, which happens more than you'd think on a long job where the keys sit with a solicitor rather than with a family. The office handling the estate wrote back: "Apologies I got the dates mixed up, we can return Mon 20th, Tues 21st and Wed 22nd March." Those three consecutive days are what finished it. Fourteen loads in total, nine days on site, and a crew who slept well that week.
There's an order to a day like that, and it's the same order on a one-day house clearance in Corsham. The van goes on the nearest hard standing we can find, one man stays with it, and the rest work the house from the far room back towards the door so nothing already sorted gets walked through twice. Anything the executor has asked us to leave is tagged and put in one room before we start lifting. Paperwork, photographs and anything that looks like a document are set aside in a box for the family, every time. On the Box clearance that box came out on day two and went back to the instructing office intact.
What actually left the house
Nothing exotic, just an enormous quantity of it. Ordinary furniture, decades of household contents, mattresses, a small fridge freezer, a television, a car tyre out of the garden, and a run of upholstered items — sofa, chairs, divans. Plus the green waste and the fly-tipped-looking pile that had built up outside.
Sorting on a house like that is done at the van, not later. Anything sound and clean enough to be used again is set aside for a reuse outfit rather than tipped, and in a verminous property that list is short and honest. Soft goods from an infested house are not going to a charity shop, and we won't pretend otherwise. What can't be reused is weighed in at a permitted transfer station and the tickets are kept against the job, so an executor has paperwork showing where an estate's contents went. Executors handling probate ask for those tickets more often than anyone else, and they're yours for the asking.
Upholstered seating has its own route now. Since the persistent organic pollutant rules came in, anything with fabric or foam on a frame. Sofas, armchairs, padded stools, office chairs — has to be kept separate from general household waste and destroyed at a permitted facility rather than recycled or landfilled. Fridges and freezers go the same way for different reasons: the refrigerant has to be removed under permit before the cabinet is broken up. Mattresses and televisions are each handled separately again. None of that is optional and none of it is quick, which is why a van that looks half full can still be a full load in practice.
Some things we simply can't put in a house load at all. Half-used tins of paint and varnish, thinners, patio gas bottles, car batteries, asbestos sheeting off a shed roof. Leave them to one side and the team will tell you on the day what needs a specialist collection and what Wiltshire Council will take at one of their household recycling centres. Often it's easier for you to run three tins up yourself than to have us arrange a separate uplift. Ammunition, fireworks and old medicines turn up in probate houses now and again too; those get their own phone call, not a bin bag.
Working in Corsham itself
Corsham is Bath stone, and Bath stone means terraces built long before anyone owned a Transit. The old weavers' cottages and the tighter streets off the High Street have no drive, no side access, and a front door that opens straight onto the pavement. That's fine — it just means one of the crew stays on the van while the others carry, and it means we'd rather know in advance than find out at nine in the morning. Out at Pickwick, Neston, Gastard, Hawthorn, Rudloe and up towards Box and Colerne it flips completely: detached houses, big gardens, a garage and often a shed or two that turn out to hold half the job. Corsham Court sits in the middle of the town and the roads round the park are narrow enough that a lorry would be a nuisance, so we run vans.
The other Corsham quirk is the ground itself. This is quarry country — the stone mines under Box and Corsham are famous — and a fair number of the older properties have deep cellars cut into rock, unlit, reached by stone steps. Cellars take longer than anyone expects. We bring lighting.
Then there's the newer end of town. The estates built out towards Rudloe and Westwells are post-war and later, with parking bays rather than drives, and the flats among them are the usual first-floor-with-a-single-staircase arrangement. A flat clearance in SN13 is rarely about weight — it's about how many times a man can go up and down a stairwell in a morning. We'll say so on the phone rather than discover it on the day. End of tenancy work is the same story: a landlord or a managing agent wants the place empty and swept by a fixed date, and the date is the whole job.
Hoarded properties are ordinary work for us rather than something we treat as a special case, in Corsham as anywhere else. So are properties where the previous occupier's family live three counties away and can't face going in. If that's where you are, ring the office on 0800 046 5555 and describe the house honestly — the worse it is, the less it surprises us.
Where else we go from here
The same crews cover the SN, BA and SP districts across Wiltshire. That's SN13 for Corsham and Box, SN14 and SN15 for Chippenham, SN12 for Melksham, SN11 for Calne, SN10 for Devizes, SN16 for Malmesbury and SN8 out towards Marlborough and Pewsey. Westward it's BA14 for Trowbridge, BA15 for Bradford-on-Avon, BA13 for Westbury and BA12 for Warminster. South we run down through Salisbury and out to Tidworth on the SP postcodes.
Several of those towns have pages of their own. house clearance in Chippenham five miles up the A4, house clearance in Melksham south of us, house clearance in Trowbridge further down the BA14 side, and house clearance in Warminster at the far end of the run.
Corsham lost its own station back in the sixties, so the practical rail points are Chippenham on the main Great Western line about five miles up the A4, Melksham on the TransWilts route. Bath Spa a short run west. Handy to know if you're travelling in from London or Bristol to open up a property for us — plenty of executors do exactly that, meet the team at nine, hand over a key and head back.
Cost, and how it's worked out
We work out a house clearance in Corsham on how much comes out of the building — van loads and days on site — and you'll have that in writing before anyone books a date. The quote is free and there's no obligation attached to it. Send photographs or a short video through the form on this page, or ring and talk it through; either way we come back to you in writing, not with a vague figure over the phone that changes later.
If the team finds the job is bigger than the photographs suggested — as at Box — you get told that day, with the options set out plainly, before any further work goes ahead. We don't carry on quietly and present a surprise at the end. There's nothing to pay up front, the invoice follows the work, and where the clearance is part of an estate we'll invoice the solicitor, the trustee or the executor directly and it can be settled from the estate. Probate clearances are a good half of what we do in this part of Wiltshire, and that arrangement is the normal one, not a favour.
The smaller ones matter too
Not everything is a nine-day job, and most Corsham house clearance work isn't. A two-bedroom terrace where the family have already taken what they want and the rest goes in a single day. A bungalow where the loft hatch hasn't been lifted since the seventies and there's a cold-water tank to work around. A garage, a shed at the bottom of a long garden, a single wardrobe that was built in the room it stands in and won't come down the stairs whole.
We'll take one item as readily as a whole house: a piano, a range cooker, a three-piece suite left behind by a tenant. Garage and loft clearances get booked on their own all the time, usually before a sale, and they're often the tidiest half-day in the diary. Where an auction house or a valuer is taking the good pieces first, we come in behind them and deal with the rest. That's a common order of play on probate work and it suits everyone, as long as we know which pieces are spoken for before the van doors open.
Booking
Abacus has been clearing houses since 2007 and the business behind it goes back a good deal further. We're an upper-tier registered waste carrier — CBDU419679 — and fully insured, and the team leader photographs every property before and after so there's a record of what was there and what was left.
Ring the office on 0800 046 5555 with the postcode, the number of bedrooms and whether there's a loft, garage, shed or cellar involved, and you'll have a price the same day. If you can send photographs or a short video through the form on this page, even better — just be prepared, as at Box, for the house to have opinions of its own once we open the doors.
House clearance in Corsham — common questions
Can you invoice a solicitor or an executor on a probate job? Yes. On a probate house clearance we invoice the solicitor, the executor or the estate directly rather than sending anything to a family member personally, and the payment can come out of the estate. There is no deposit — the invoice follows once the property is empty.
Do I have to be at the house on the day? No. A good share of the Corsham properties we clear are arranged by someone living elsewhere. Keys come from a neighbour or an agent, and photographs of the empty rooms go over the same day.
Do you do garage and loft clearance on its own? Yes. Say what is up there and how you reach it when you ring, because a hatch and a ladder is a different day to a fixed stair. A garage that has not been opened in years is usually fuller than anyone remembers.
How much notice do you need? Usually a few days. If there is a completion date or an end of tenancy checkout fixed, say so when you ring and we will book to it.
What happens to everything you take? Anything reusable goes to a charity shop or reuse project first. The rest is weighed in at a licensed transfer station under our carrier registration, and the waste transfer note is yours for the file if you want it.
Will you take a hoarded house? Yes, without comment. Tell us the state of it on the phone so the right number of hands and the right number of days are booked in advance. A probate clearance of a full house is ordinary work for this crew.
