A house clearance in Devizes usually starts long before anybody from the crew has stood in the hall. The list reached us by email before anyone had seen the house. Two single divan beds with mattresses and headboards. A double mattress. Two two-seater sofas and the easy chair that matched them. A tall narrow storage unit and a short shelf unit out of the same bedroom, a three-drawer dresser, two framed mirrors meant to stand on top of it, a small drop-leaf kitchen table, and an upright fridge/freezer from the kitchen. Carpets, curtains and light fittings on top. Then the sentence that always adds another van's worth: "There are a few small odds and ends as well."
The house was described to us as a "modest 3 bed semi", and it sat in SN10, a few minutes out from the Market Place. Before ringing us the family had spent a fortnight trying to find local groups who would take the furniture on. A little of it went that way. Most didn't, and by then a completion date had landed on the sale — the Friday of the following week — which is how a job that had been drifting for a month suddenly needed doing on a Tuesday in June 2024.
The relative organising everything was driving over from north of Bristol, an hour and a bit each way depending on what the A4 is doing through Chippenham. When we offered an early start the answer came back straight: "to be blunt a 9 am start would be extremely difficult for me." So we agreed ten, and the day still finished early. The crew came in off the A361, parked on the road outside, and worked from the loft hatch down. One load out.
Nothing was left behind that had been asked for — carpets, curtains and light fittings all went, and the only thing lifted out of the kitchen was the fridge/freezer, exactly as we'd been told. That fridge/freezer travelled separately because the gas has to be drawn off at a proper facility, the mattresses were tagged for the foam route, and there was one POP item among the soft furniture. That's persistent organic pollutants, the flame-retardant rule that now covers most sofas, armchairs and padded chairs made in this country. A couch can't go in with mixed rubbish any more. It has to be kept apart and destroyed at a permitted site, which is why upholstery gets booked in on its own before the van ever leaves the yard.
No station, and what that changes
Devizes is one of the biggest towns in Wiltshire with no railway of its own — the line closed in the sixties and never came back. When people ask where we travel in from, the answer is always by road. Melksham in SN12 is the nearest station, though Pewsey east of here in SN9 has the better service on the Reading line; Chippenham in SN15 and Melksham in SN12 are the other two most people use, with Trowbridge in BA14 and Bradford-on-Avon in BA15 if you're coming up from the Bath direction. None of that matters to a clearance except in one respect: nobody moves a divan by train. Everything that leaves a house here leaves in a vehicle, and that vehicle has to stop somewhere near the front door.
Which is the real constraint in this town. The older streets off the Market Place and down towards the canal have kerbside parking that fills by half eight and stays full all day. Out in Roundway, Nursteed and the newer estates it's straightforward — driveways, wider verges, room to turn a Luton. In the villages it swings both ways. We've worked cottages where the van sat half on a grass bank with somebody watching the wing mirror, and bungalows where you could reverse to the back door and drop the tailgate. Tell us on the phone which of those you've got and we'll bring the right vehicle and the right number of pairs of hands.
The kinds of house clearance Devizes asks us for
Most of the work in SN10 is a whole house at once, but not all of it, and it's worth saying what else we turn up for.
End of tenancy clearance in Devizes
A let that's been handed back with half the furniture still in it needs emptying to a date, not to a convenient week. We work to the check-out, take the lot including the bits the outgoing tenant swore they'd collect, and leave the floors clear for the inventory. Landlords and managing agents usually hand us a key rather than meet us, which is fine as long as we know where the meters are and what's staying.
Flat clearance in SN10
The town has more flats than people outside it expect — conversions above the shops around the Market Place, sheltered schemes, and the newer blocks on the edge of the estates. Stairs decide the day on those. A first-floor conversion with a turn on the landing takes longer than a three-bed semi with a driveway, and a sofa that came in before the stair rail was fitted sometimes has to come apart to get out. We'd rather know that in advance than discover it at four o'clock.
Garage and loft clearance in Devizes, sheds included
Plenty of jobs here are not the house at all. A loft nobody has been up since the boiler was changed, a garage with a mower, a workbench and thirty years of tins on the shelf, a shed that has gone soft at the base. We take those on their own, and we go up and in ourselves — nobody should be on a loft ladder passing boxes down at seventy.
Furniture removal and single items
One wardrobe, one bed, one three-piece suite. If a single heavy item is all that stands between you and a finished house, say so and we'll collect it on a day we're already out this way. There's no harm in asking, and it saves you a trailer and a trip.
The ground we cover
House clearance in Devizes rarely stops at the town boundary, so it's worth being plain about the patch. SN10 takes in Devizes itself along with Roundway, Potterne, Market Lavington, Urchfont, Bishops Cannings and Rowde. SN9 covers Pewsey and the villages down the Vale. SN8 runs east towards Marlborough. West of us it's SN11 for Calne, SN12 for Melksham, SN13 for Corsham and SN15 for Chippenham, then BA14 at Trowbridge and BA15 at Bradford-on-Avon. South, over the Plain, we work SP4 around Amesbury and Durrington, SP2 out to Wilton, and SP5 down towards Downton. All Wiltshire, all under Wiltshire Council for waste rules, which at least keeps the paperwork consistent from one job to the next.
Several of those towns have a page of their own on this site: house clearance in Chippenham, house clearance in Melksham, house clearance in Trowbridge and, smaller and quieter, house clearance in Corsham. If your property sits between two of them, ring and we'll tell you which crew is nearest on the day.
Distances in this county lie to you, mind. Fifteen miles on the map can be forty minutes behind a tractor on the A342. We plan the day around that rather than pretending otherwise.
Probate house clearance in Devizes
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 and nothing is asked for up front — the invoice follows once the property is empty. A fair share of the work here starts in a solicitor's office rather than with a family. One probate clearance in the town was instructed through a firm a short walk from the Market Place. The solicitor with the file went off on annual leave, a colleague picked up his emails, and the application for the Grant of Probate was still at the stage of gathering information, with a couple of months expected before it came through. Meanwhile the house was going on the market. That is the ordinary shape of probate house clearance in Devizes — the legal side moves at its own pace and the property can't wait for it.
So we get on with it, provided somebody with the authority instructs us in writing. Executors are very often somewhere else entirely: a son in another county, a daughter abroad, a solicitor holding the keys because nobody in the family lives within fifty miles. We can collect a key, work to a date agreed by email, and send photographs of the empty rooms at the end so that whoever is responsible can see the state of the place without driving down for it.
We'll also write down what came out of each room, which is worth having when there are siblings in three counties all wondering what became of the dresser. On a probate job that record matters more than it does on an ordinary clearance — it's the difference between a settled estate and a family argument. If you'd like the detail, our probate house clearance page sets out how we work with executors and solicitors.
What happens to the contents
Anything sound is offered on before it's tipped — furniture, tools, crockery, books, garden gear. There are shops and reuse schemes across Wiltshire that will take decent items, and the incentive runs the right way round, because a chest of drawers that finds a second home is a chest of drawers nobody has to weigh in. What nobody can use is booked into a permitted transfer station, weighed in, and comes back with a transfer note you're welcome to see. Our waste carrier registration is CBDU419679, and we carry insurance for the work and for the property while we're inside it. Ask any firm for that number before they load a stick of furniture. The fly-tipping that turns up in the lanes around Bishops Cannings and Erlestoke didn't get there by accident — somebody took a job off a householder and then drove until it was dark.
A few things won't go in a normal load. Part-used paint and chemicals, gas cylinders, asbestos sheeting off an old garage roof — each of those needs its own arrangement, and we'll tell you so rather than quietly leaving them in the shed for the next owner. Fridges and freezers are no trouble at all, they simply go through degassing on their own. Loose garden and building waste we can take as house rubbish removal on the same visit, so long as we know it's there before we load.
Hoarder house clearance, and the houses nobody wants to describe
Some of the properties we're called to are extremely full. Forty years of newspapers, rooms you enter sideways, a garage that hasn't opened since the nineties. Nobody on the crew comments, and nobody has to explain themselves to us. A hoarder house clearance is slower by its nature: those days sometimes need two visits and careful sorting, because banknotes and jewellery turn up tucked in among the papers more often than you'd think — when they do, they go in a box on the kitchen table for the family, not into the van. If the house has been shut up a long while there may be a smell, or mice, and we'd rather hear that on the phone than meet it at the door. It changes nothing about whether we take the job. There's more on the hoarder house clearance page.
Common questions about house clearance in Devizes
How much does a house clearance in Devizes cost? Ring the office on 0800 046 5555 with the postcode, the number of bedrooms and a rough idea of what's still inside, or send photographs through the form on this page. You'll get a figure back for your house, not a guess about houses in general. Photographs settle it in a couple of minutes, and asking puts you under no obligation.
Do you clear the villages as well as the town? Yes. SN10 is Devizes, Roundway, Potterne, Market Lavington, Urchfont, Bishops Cannings and Rowde, and we're out in those villages most weeks. Access is the only thing that changes: tell us if the lane is narrow or the turning is tight and we'll size the vehicle accordingly.
How long does a clearance take? A three-bedroom house with the loft and a shed is usually one day with the right crew on it. A very full property, or one where every stick has to be carried down an outside stair, can run to two. We'll tell you which we think it is when you ring, and we'll say so if we're wrong once we're in.
Can you work with an executor who lives out of the county? That's most of them. Written instruction from the executor or the solicitor is all we need, we can arrange the key, and photographs of the cleared rooms go back the same day. Nobody has to drive to Devizes to watch a van being loaded.
What won't you take? Paint and household chemicals, gas cylinders, and asbestos — an old garage roof or a bit of shed lining. Those need their own arrangement and we'll point you at it. Everything else, including fridges, freezers, mattresses and upholstery, goes in the ordinary way under the rules described above.
Do we need to be there all day? No. Somebody to let us in and somebody to walk round at the end is plenty. Plenty of our house clearance work in Devizes is done with a key from an agent and a phone call when the last room is clear.
If you've a property in Devizes or the villages around it, ring the office on 0800 046 5555 with the postcode, the number of bedrooms and a rough idea of what's still inside. Photographs help enormously — send them through the form on this page and you'll have a figure and a date back quickly. And if a skip on the drive would genuinely suit you better, we'll say so.
