Barn conversions run long. They start with a building that has been used for storage for thirty years and end with a house, and the waste arrives in phases that have almost nothing in common with each other. Barn conversion waste is also the job where the first phase catches people out most, because clearing the building is treated as a preliminary rather than as a project in its own right. Our Charnock Richard skip hire service covers a fair amount of this work across the surrounding farmland.
Establish what is in the roof before anything else
The single most common material on an agricultural building of the last seventy years is corrugated cement sheeting, and on anything predating the mid nineteen nineties there is a real chance it contains asbestos. It cannot be identified by eye.
This needs testing before a tool goes near it, before scaffold, and certainly before a container is booked. If it is positive, it needs a licensed contractor and separate disposal, and our guide to hazardous waste and why it cannot go in a skip explains what that involves. We cannot take it under any circumstances.
The same applies to old lagging around any pipework and to sheeting used for internal partitions in later alterations. Get all of it surveyed in one go rather than discovering it in stages.
Bats and birds need checking too
An old barn is a habitat. Bats roost in roof spaces and behind timbers, barn owls nest in them, and swallows use them every summer. Bats and their roosts are protected whether or not bats are present at the time, and works affecting a roost need a survey and usually a licence.
May is the wrong month to be finding this out, because the maternity season is under way and survey windows are seasonal. On a barn conversion the ecology work should be done at the planning stage, and if it has not been, that is the thing to sort before anything else.
Phase one is the clear out
Whatever the building has been used for, it will be full. Old machinery, feed bags, fencing materials, tyres, pallets, drums, furniture that somebody stored there in the nineteen nineties, and a great deal of general accumulation.
Several categories need pulling out rather than skipping. Tyres cannot go in a container and need a registered disposal route. Waste oil, fuel, chemicals and old agricultural products all need separate handling. Batteries have a scrap value and are hazardous waste.
Scrap metal is the good news in this phase. Old machinery, steel sections, gates and fittings have a real value and a merchant will usually collect from a farm yard, which reduces the container count noticeably.
For the general clearance an 8 tonne builders skip is the working unit, and most barns need several.
Phase two is salvage and strip out
This is where a barn conversion differs from an ordinary build. A great deal of what comes off the building is worth keeping.
Stone, hand made brick, roof slate, structural timber and old ironmongery all have value, and on a conversion much of it goes back into the finished building. Reclaimed material is also frequently what a planning condition requires, because the character of the building has to survive the conversion.
So the strip out needs a salvage store and someone deciding what is which. Set that up before the phase starts rather than sorting through a skip afterwards.
What does go in the container is the genuine waste. Failed timber, old cement render, later blockwork infill, rotten boarding and any twentieth century additions that are not being kept.
Phase three is heavy and inert
The groundworks phase produces the weight. New floors mean breaking out old concrete and excavating, drainage runs mean spoil, and any underpinning or new footings mean more of the same.
Excavated ground swells once it is dug out, so the volume coming out always exceeds the hole it came from, and around here the ground is heavy and holds water. Our page on how full can you fill a skip with soil covers what that means for a container, and our guide to skip size versus weight limits explains why weight rather than volume decides the size.
On a dig of any scale, bulk removal by grab lorry beats a series of skip exchanges, and we will say so where that is the case rather than selling you containers you do not need.
Phase four is fit out
The last phase is packaging, offcuts, insulation and plasterboard. Bulky, light and continuous rather than arriving in one burst.
Plasterboard has to be kept out of the general load, which our page on plasterboard disposal and building waste separation explains. On a project this long, agreeing a regular exchange rhythm with us works far better than ringing when something is overflowing.
Access decides the container
Farm access is the constraint on almost every one of these. A hardstanding yard with room to turn will take anything, including a roll on roll off container, which on a project of this size moves far more volume per collection than a skip.
An unmade track after rain is a different matter, and our drivers will tell you if a route looks marginal rather than getting a lorry stuck on it. Where access is difficult, smaller containers exchanged more often is the workable answer.
Everything we take comes back to our own recycling centre for sorting, which our environmental and recycling page explains.
We cover this area regularly, running Chorley skip hire and Coppull skip hire jobs alongside Charnock Richard.
Ring us on 01257 752399 with your programme and we will plan the containers around the phases rather than reacting to each one. Our contact page is there if your builder would rather deal with us directly.
