Clearing a parent's home, step by step

There is no hurry

Nothing in law requires a house to be emptied by any particular date.

That is worth saying first because almost everybody arrives at this believing the opposite. Where real pressure exists it comes from a tenancy agreement, a buyer, or a care home charging for a room that is no longer needed, and all three are more negotiable than they first appear. If you are being hurried, it is worth working out by whom, and on what authority.

Most families take several weeks. Some take months. Both are normal.

Before anything moves

Photograph every room.

All of it, including the insides of wardrobes, drawers and the loft. It takes twenty minutes on a phone and it does two jobs. It settles the conversations that come up later about what was there, which happen in the most loving families and are much easier to resolve with a picture than with two recollections. And if the estate has to be valued, those photographs are the record of what the house held on the day.

Then find, if you do not already have them:

• The will, and any letter of wishes kept with it
• Deeds, the tenancy agreement, or details of the mortgage
• Insurance documents, particularly buildings and contents
• Recent bank, pension and utility correspondence

Contents insurance is the one people miss. A policy on an unoccupied house often lapses or narrows after 30 days empty, and if the house is going to stand empty for a while it is worth ringing the insurer before rather than after.

The box that leaves first

Before any furniture moves, gather everything that is hard to replace into one box and take it out of the house.

• Documents and photographs
• Jewellery, watches and small valuables
• Keys, and anything with an address on it
• Medals, letters, anything with only sentimental value
• Medication, for return to a pharmacy

Papers and jewellery turn up inside furniture with remarkable reliability. Behind drawers, taped under desks, inside books, in coat pockets, in the pages of a road atlas. A clearance firm that does estate work knows this and will hand you what they find, but the safest place for it is out of the house before anyone else is in it.

Take the box somewhere else. Not the hall.

One room at a time

The instinct is to start everywhere. It does not work, because every room turns into a decision about every object in it and there is no point at which anything is finished.

Pick one room, ideally the least emotionally loaded one. The garage, a spare bedroom, a bathroom. Finish it. Then pick the next.

Within a room, four piles are enough: keep, family to decide, sell or donate, and dispose. If something does not fall obviously into one of them, put it in “family to decide” and move on. Standing in a bedroom deciding about a single cardigan is how a day disappears.

A few things that make it easier:

• Do the kitchen and bathroom early. They are mostly practical decisions and finishing a room quickly helps more than you would think.
• Leave the personal rooms last. A wardrobe of clothes is the hardest room in the house and it does not get easier by being first.
• Agree the rules with siblings before you start, not during. Who gets first refusal, what happens with anything two people want, and whether anything is being sold. An hour on this beforehand prevents most of what goes wrong.

When to bring a firm in

Once you know what is actually leaving.

The order matters. Book a clearance before the sorting and you are paying somebody to stand around while a family makes decisions, or worse, making those decisions under time pressure with a van outside. Sort first, then get quotes on what is left.

When you do get quotes, ask for the waste carrier registration number before you talk about price. It is the only claim on a quote you can verify yourself, and if the contents of the house are later fly-tipped, the duty of care means a council can come to the estate rather than to whoever dumped them.

For a probate clearance specifically, ask two more things. Whether they have done estate work before, and what their process is for anything found inside furniture. A firm that does this regularly will answer both without hesitating.

If you need somebody, find a registered firm near you. Every one we list is checked against the Environment Agency’s public register, with the date we read it.

If the house is rented

The clock is different and it is worth understanding early.

A tenancy does not end automatically on death. It usually passes to the estate, and rent continues to be due from the estate until the tenancy is properly ended. The executors or administrators are the ones who can end it, which in practice means this is one of the things that has to wait for probate if probate is needed at all.

Speak to the landlord early and in writing. Most will be reasonable about timescales if they know what is happening and when it will finish. What they will not do is accept a verbal arrangement they later cannot evidence.

One thing to be aware of: waste from a rented property being cleared by the landlord is business waste rather than household waste, with heavier paperwork requirements. If the landlord is doing the clearing, that is their duty rather than yours.