Clearing one building is a straightforward piece of work. Clearing twenty is a different discipline, and the difference is not twenty times the effort. It is the order.
Get the sequence right and the vehicle is loaded on every leg, the lifting vehicle sets up once in a position that reaches several units, and nothing has to be shuffled twice. Get it wrong and you pay for a building to be moved to the middle of the yard so that another one can get out past it.
Start at the exit, not at the building
The first thing to establish on a compound clearance is not which building is worth the most. It is where the vehicle can stand and how it gets there. Everything else is planned backwards from that.
On most compounds there is one route in that a loaded lorry can actually use, and one or two places where it can sit with its outriggers down on ground that will carry it. Those positions dictate what can be reached. A unit thirty feet from a hardstanding may be easier to take than one ten feet away across soft ground with a cable overhead.
What tends to come off first
As a rule of thumb, the order runs like this, though every site rearranges it:
- Anything blocking the route. Stores and containers parked across the run in come out before anything else, even when they are the least valuable things on the site.
- The units furthest from the exit. Working from the back forwards means the vehicle never has to reverse past what it has already loaded, and the last building out is the one nearest the gate.
- Anything with services still attached. Not because it goes first, but because it has to be identified first. A building that still has a live supply into it is not going anywhere until that has been disconnected and made safe by somebody competent to do it, and that is arranged by you, not by our crews.
- Linked and joined buildings. Multi-bay blocks come apart in the order they went together. Reading that order wrong is how a roof gets damaged.
Mixed sites are quoted as one job
Most compounds are not one type of thing. There is a run of modular offices, a couple of anti-vandal stores, a welfare unit, two or three containers and a heap of odds and ends between them. Quoting those separately makes no sense, because they share the same access, the same lift setup and often the same vehicle.
It also produces a fairer answer. The saleable buildings on a site offset the ones that are only fit for clearing. Priced individually you would be paid for some and invoiced for others; priced as one job the arithmetic is done across the whole compound. If you have containers standing alongside modular buildings, send both.
Phased clearance on a live site
Plenty of compounds cannot empty in one go, because people are still working out of half of them. That is normal. What it means in practice is that the welfare and the office go last, and the sequence is built around keeping those two functioning while everything around them comes out.
The thing worth flagging early is that a phased clearance costs more per unit than a single visit. Each return means another mobilisation. Sometimes that is unavoidable and it is simply what the job is. Sometimes a fortnight of patience collapses three visits into one, and that is worth knowing before the first one is booked.
What we need to price it
For a compound, one photograph of each building is not enough on its own. What helps most is:
- A photograph from the gate looking in, so the run and the turning space are visible.
- A rough sketch or an aerial view with the buildings numbered. A screenshot from a mapping site with numbers written on it is perfect.
- Each unit photographed from two sides, with rough dimensions.
- Anything overhead marked: cables, low branches, canopies, gantries.
- What is still connected and what is dead.
From that we can work out the sequence, what comes off in one visit and what has to be split, and give you the building figures and the haulage figures separately so the shape of the job is visible.
Site clearance across England, Scotland and Wales is routine work for us, and it is a large part of what the vehicles do. If you have a compound to empty, send the whole picture rather than one unit at a time.