A garage conversion is one of the few building jobs that suits winter, because once the door is bricked up almost all of it happens indoors. We deliver into a lot of these across the winter months through our Coppull skip hire service, and the thing that most often goes wrong is not the building work. It is that garage conversion waste arrives in two completely different forms at two different times, and people book one skip for both.
The two phases nobody separates
Phase one is the clearance. Whatever has been living in that garage comes out first, and in most houses that is a decade of accumulation. Bikes nobody rides, paint tins, offcuts of timber from previous jobs, garden furniture, a chest freezer, boxes. This waste is light, bulky and extremely varied.
Phase two is the construction. Blockwork from infilling the door opening, the old concrete floor if it is being broken up and relaid, screed, plaster, plasterboard offcuts, and whatever comes off the walls. This waste is heavy, inert and dense.
Those two loads want different things from a skip. Phase one needs volume and does not trouble the weight limit. Phase two hits the weight limit while barely filling the container. Putting them in the same skip means you either run out of space in week one or run out of weight allowance in week three, and our page on skip size versus weight limits explains why those two things are separate constraints.
What we would suggest instead is a skip for the clearance, taken away once the garage is empty, and a second one brought in when the building work starts. It sounds like more expense and it usually is not, because you are sizing each one for what it actually has to hold.
Clearing the garage first
Do this before anything else and do it properly, because a half cleared garage makes every subsequent stage harder. The builder cannot work around your boxes and you will end up moving everything twice.
Two things need pulling out rather than skipping. Old paint tins with liquid paint still in them are not skip waste and need taking to a household waste site that accepts them. If they are fully dried out and solid, that is a different matter, and leaving the lids off for a fortnight beforehand solves the problem for you.
Chest freezers and old fridges need separate handling because of the coolant in the cooling circuit, so tell us if there is one in there and we will advise on it rather than the driver having to decline it on the day. Gas bottles for a barbecue or a patio heater are the other thing we see in Coppull garages regularly and they cannot go in either, full or empty.
For the clearance phase a 4 tonne midi skip handles most single garages comfortably.
The concrete floor is the heavy part
Not every conversion needs the floor up, but a good many do, because garage floors are usually laid lower than the house floor and often have no damp proof membrane underneath. If yours is coming up, that single element will dominate your waste planning.
Broken concrete is about as heavy as domestic waste gets. A single garage floor slab broken out produces a load that will reach the weight limit of a large skip while sitting well below the rim. Keep it in a thin even layer across the base rather than heaping it, and do not put anything else in on top of it until you have seen how much of the allowance it has used.
The blockwork from the door infill adds to that, along with any render and the old lintel if it is being replaced. For the construction phase an 8 tonne builders skip is what we would normally put in, and our builders skip hire for construction and renovation waste page covers what these loads typically involve.
Access and where the skip sits
The convenient thing about a garage conversion is that you almost always have somewhere to put the skip, because the driveway that served the garage is right there and is about to stop being needed for a car anyway. That saves you a permit and puts the skip within a few steps of the work.
The one thing to watch in winter is that a driveway which has taken a car for twenty years has not necessarily taken a loaded skip. Older concrete drives around here often have joints and cracks that have been quietly getting worse, and freeze and thaw over a Coppull winter opens them up. Our drivers carry boards and will use them, but point it out if you have any doubts about the surface.
Getting the sequence right saves money
The pattern we see work best is a clearance skip on day one, a fortnight of building work with the heavy waste stockpiled somewhere sensible, then a second skip for the construction phase. If the job is running longer, we can work to your programme rather than you working to ours.
Talk to us before the first delivery rather than after it. Tell us whether the floor is coming up, because that one detail changes the answer more than anything else you can tell us.
Local coverage and what happens to the load
We cover Coppull and the surrounding area from our own yard, running alongside Chorley skip hire and Charnock Richard skip hire jobs most weeks. Broken concrete and clean rubble are among the most recoverable materials we handle, which is one of the reasons we ask people to keep them separate where they can, and our environmental and recycling page explains what happens once it reaches our site.
Ring us on 01257 752399 with the details of your conversion and we will map the skips to the stages of the job. Our contact page is there if you would rather send the plans over.
