Pulling up old carpet, laminate or vinyl is often the first move in freshening up a room, and it produces more bulk than most people expect. Carpet rolls are heavy and unwieldy, underlay compresses into the corners, and lifting old laminate or floorboards adds offcuts, gripper rods and nails to the pile. A skip takes the lot in one go, and our Ormskirk skip hire team can size it to however many rooms you are stripping back.
How much room flooring really takes
A single room of carpet does not sound like much until it is rolled up and standing in the hall, and a whole house of flooring quickly fills a skip. Carpet does not break down or flatten the way other waste does, so it eats space rather than weight. The older terraced and semi-detached homes around Ormskirk add a twist here, because floors tend to build up in layers over the decades, with carpet laid over vinyl laid over the original boards, so what looks like a two-room job often turns into far more once everything actually comes up. Knowing roughly how many rooms you are clearing, and whether you are taking the floor right back to the joists, helps us point you at the right size rather than leaving you short on the day. Weight comes into it once a job goes beyond soft coverings, because lifting old quarry tiles, a tiled hearth or a bed of levelling screed adds a lot of dead weight in very little space, and a load like that can fill the weight limit of a larger skip long before it looks full. When you tell us what is coming up, not just how many rooms, we can balance the bulk of the carpet against the weight of anything solid underneath and steer you to a size that suits both.
A mixed flooring load
Most flooring jobs are a mix. There is the old floor covering itself, the underlay or foam beneath it, the gripper rods round the edges, and sometimes lifted boards or a layer of old adhesive-backed tiles underneath. All of that goes in the same skip, and for a typical domestic flooring clear-out our 4 tonne midi skip hire handles it well. A whole-house refurbishment, the kind a landlord often runs between tenancies on the student lets near Edge Hill, can step up to the 8 tonne builders skip hire, and the full range with capacities sits on our skip sizes page.
Watch for what cannot go in a skip
There is one thing worth pausing on before you start lifting. In homes built or last floored before 2000, certain old floor tiles, the bitumen-style adhesive beneath them and some older lino can contain asbestos, and a fair number of Ormskirk’s pre-war terraces and mid-century semis fall into that bracket. Material like that must not go in a general skip and needs proper specialist removal and disposal, so if you peel back a carpet and find small, brittle tiles or a black tar-like backing you are unsure about, stop and check before you go any further rather than bagging it up with the rest. We are always happy to talk it through if you are not certain what you are looking at. The other thing to deal with safely is the sharp end of the job, the gripper rods and tack strips studded with nails, which are best folded into a bag or a stout box so nobody catches a hand while loading.
Loading bulky rolls without wasting space
Because carpet is all bulk and little weight, a few minutes spent cutting long rolls down lets you lay them flatter and fit far more in. We are not going to tell you how to spend your weekend, but a skip loaded with full-length rolls standing on end fills up fast, whereas cut lengths laid flat make the most of what you are paying for. The tidiest way to pack a flooring skip is to lay the heavier timber, boards and skirting flat along the base, then build the carpet and underlay on top, keeping everything level and below the rim so we can sheet the load and lift it cleanly when we collect.
Where your old flooring ends up
What we take away does not simply head for landfill. Timber floorboards, skirting and batten come out for recovery, the metal in tack strips and threshold bars is separated, and while carpet and foam underlay are harder materials to recycle, we divert what we can through our own recycling operation rather than tipping the whole load. You can read more about how that side of things works on our environmental and recycling page.
Book a skip for your flooring job
Tell our Ormskirk team how many rooms you are stripping and what is coming up, on 01704 779345 or through the contact page, and we will get a skip to you sized for the bulk. We cover the town and the surrounding villages, so whether you are in the centre or out towards Aughton skip hire, the floor can be up and gone without it sitting in your hall for a fortnight.
