Monday, October 31, 2011

Advice you can’t afford to skip


So you’ve finally bitten the bullet (or maybe your partner has threatened you with one) and decided to get rid of all the rubbish around the house. You’re looking forward to more space, less clutter, and not having to sleep with one eye open.

Just one question: How are you going to get rid of it all?

You may think the best solution is hire a skip, throw everything in there, and then have it hauled away a week later. But before you make that phone call or hit that website, here are a few things you should know.

Size matters
The first thing you’ll be asked is what size skip you need. Unfortunately there’s no “big enough to get all my crap out of the garage” size to choose from. No, in skip-land, everything is in cubic metres.

Now you may vaguely remember what a cubic metre is from your high school days, but do you have any idea how big that actually is? And can you look at your piles of rubbish and say “Oh, there’s exactly three cubic metres of junk there”? Of course not. So you’ll either hire a skip that’s too small for your stuff, or waste money paying for one that’s much bigger than you need.

Height restrictions
How heavy is the stuff you’re getting rid of? That’s important to know, because if you hire a skip you’ll have to lift everything at least a metre off the ground to get it over the sides. And if you hire a big one, you may have to lift it even higher.

So unless you’re a Jedi knight or have a burly neighbour, you may not be able to get rid of the heavier stuff no matter how much you want to.

The grass isn’t always greener
Chances are your skip is going to be sitting on the front lawn for a week. (It just seems longer, that’s all.) And while the skips on the website may look in pristine condition, chances are the one they give you will look pretty ugly. So if you’re trying to impress the neighbours (or maybe potential buyers) with how nice your house looks, this isn’t the way to go about it.

Even when they’re taken it away again, you’ll probably have a patch of ugly yellowed grass from where it was sitting. Unfortunately most skips are rectangular rather than circular, so no-one will believe your story about the spacecraft landing there.

There’s a new skip on town
One other thing you should be aware of: you’re not the only person in your neighbourhood with stuff to get rid of. And you’ll find out soon enough when you have a skip sitting in your front yard. When word gets around there’s an empty skip on your lawn, people from miles around will start making daring midnight runs to dump their stuff. (They obviously have burly neighbours.)

So what’s the alternative? 
Well, you can give us a call. We won’t dump a skip on your front lawn for a week and leave you to it. We’ll bring our own truck, do all the lifting and carrying, and then take it all away. And we only charge you for the amount of rubbish you have, not the amount of rubbish you think you have.

And when we’re done, you’ll have plenty of space (not to mention energy) to do what you really want to be doing.

Like practising those Jedi moves.