Clearing up after water has been in is a job nobody chooses. Clearing out beforehand is a job you can plan, do on a dry weekend and be glad of later. For properties near the watercourses and on the lower ground around here, arranging flood preparation skip hire in Maghull in November, while the weather still allows it, is considerably easier than arranging it in January with three inches of water in the garage.
The difference between clearing before and clearing after
It is worth understanding why this is worth doing early. Material that has been through a flood is a different proposition entirely. It is saturated, so it weighs a great deal more than it did. It is contaminated, because floodwater carries whatever it has run through on the way. And it has to come out fast, at exactly the moment when every contractor and every skip in the area is spoken for.
The same cardboard, carpet and stored furniture cleared in November is dry, light and easy to load, and the skip is available the week you ask for it. The work is the same and everything about the circumstances is better.
Start with the garage and the outbuildings
Garages take the water first and they are where most people store the things they cannot decide about. Cardboard boxes on a concrete floor, bags of clothing, old furniture waiting to go somewhere, and the bottom shelf of everything. None of it survives contact with water and most of it was never going to be used again.
The rule that helps is simple. If it is on the floor and it would be ruined by water, it either goes now or it goes up onto a shelf. Working through a garage with that one question makes the decisions much quicker than trying to judge each item on its merits.
Sheds and outbuildings are the same story with less shelter. A timber shed on a low base takes water first and dries slowest, and anything stored in it through a wet winter is usually beyond saving by the spring. If a shed has reached the end of its life anyway, taking it down in November is a far easier job than dealing with a collapsed one in February.
Flood preparation skip hire in Maghull and the ground floor rooms
Inside the house the priority is different, because you are not clearing the room so much as making it recoverable. Soft furnishings and stored boxes at floor level in a back room or under the stairs are the things that create the most work later. Getting rid of what is finished with, and lifting the rest, is the whole job.
For a garage clear and a sort through the ground floor storage, our 4 tonne midi skip handles it comfortably. Where an outbuilding is coming down as well, or there is fencing and garden material going in the same load, our 8 tonne builders skip gives the room to do it in one go.
Lifting rather than discarding is the right answer for plenty of it. A run of shelving that gets stored boxes up off the floor costs very little and works whether the water ever arrives or not, which makes the November sort worth doing even in a year when nothing happens at all.
Clearing what stops the water getting away
The other half of this job is drainage. Gullies blocked with leaf fall, a gully grid that has silted up over the autumn, and a garden full of cut back material stacked near a drain all make a bad day worse. November is the right time to clear it because the leaves are down and the ground is still workable.
Garden waste, old fence panels and general garden clutter all go in the skip without difficulty. What we cannot take is anything on the excluded list, and our guide to waste that does not belong in a skip covers the material that needs a different route. Garage shelves in particular tend to hold paint, oils and chemicals, and those need setting aside rather than tipping in.
Where the skip stands and how long you need it
Most properties around here have a drive that will take a skip, which needs no permission from anybody. Where it has to sit on the road, Sefton Council is the permit authority and it must be in place before delivery rather than arranged afterwards. We handle those applications routinely. Our local guide on hiring a skip in Maghull made simple covers the booking side.
On ground condition, a loaded skip needs firm level standing and late November is not the month for putting one on a lawn or a soft verge. Tell us what the surface is and we will bring boards where they are needed.
What happens to the load
Dry material cleared in advance is far more recoverable than the same material after a flood, which is another argument for doing it now. Timber, metal, cardboard and clean household waste all separate at our own recycling centre rather than heading straight for disposal, which is how we run environmental and recycling on everything we collect.
We work across this whole low lying stretch and do the same preparation work for customers at Aintree skip hire and Litherland skip hire addresses, where the same garages fill with the same things every year.
If you want a garage and a ground floor sorted before the winter properly arrives, ring our team on 0151 909 6399 or send the details through our contact page. Tell us what is coming out and where the skip can stand, and we will get it to you while the weather is still on your side.
