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Clearance is priced on material and labour, and the two do not track the size of the plot. A small garden packed with fifteen years of bramble and reached through a house can easily cost more than a large one with a gate onto a driveway.
Volume, First
Everything cut down has to be moved, loaded and disposed of, and different growth produces wildly different volumes from the same area:
- Rough grass and nettles — high volume, very light, compresses well
- Brambles — high volume, awkward, slow to handle, and they do not compress
- Woody shrubs and saplings — lower volume, much heavier, and worth chipping if a chipper can get in
- Ivy — dense, wet and heavy for its apparent size
- Leaf litter and years of debris — deceptively heavy, particularly wet
The Carry, Which Is Usually the Biggest Number
On most clearance jobs, moving the material is more of the labour than cutting it. A garden with a gate onto a drive where the tipper is parked is the cheap version. The same garden reached through the house, or down a shared alley, or up a flight of steps, can be double — because every barrow load is a round trip.
This is why we ask where a vehicle can park and how far that is from the garden, and why a photograph of the route is worth as much as a photograph of the garden.
The Other Things That Move It
- How far down you want to go. Cut and tidy, cleared to soil, or cleared and cultivated are three different prices
- What has to be worked around. Clearing everything is quick; clearing around plants that are being kept is slow and careful
- Slope and ground condition. Carrying uphill, or across ground too soft to barrow over, adds real time
- Non-green waste. Rubble, old fence panels, household items and building materials go into different waste streams at different rates
- Whether a chipper can get in. Chipping woody material on site reduces the volume dramatically and therefore the number of loads
What Reduces It
- Somewhere on site for the material. If there is room for a chip pile or a habitat heap in a corner, that removes a real part of the cost
- Doing it in one go rather than in stages
- Combining it with other work — tree work, stumps, turfing. The vehicle and the team are the fixed cost
- Being clear about scope in advance, which avoids the variations that push a price up on the day
- Doing it before it gets worse. Growth compounds, and a garden cleared this year is a fraction of the same garden in five
Comparing Quotations
Check that both say the same thing about three items: how far down the clearance goes, whether all waste removal is included (green and other), and what is being kept. A quotation that is noticeably cheaper is usually cheaper on one of those three, and the difference appears on the day rather than on the paper.
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Two photographs settle most of it: the garden, and the route the waste has to take to reach the road.
Tell us what needs doing across Hertfordshire and we will quote for the work. Call 07388 094829, message us on WhatsApp or use the form below.