What to Do With a Parent's Belongings

The first two weeks: do almost nothing

The single most expensive thing a family can do in the first fortnight is start clearing. Grief plus a deadline produces skips, and skips produce losses nobody can measure afterwards because the contents are already gone.

Three things are worth doing straight away, and they are all about information rather than disposal:

• Secure the house. Change the locks if keys are unaccounted for. Estate homes sit empty and word travels.
• Find the paperwork before you find anything else. Wills, deeds, insurance policies, titles, safe deposit keys. Check the obvious places and then the unobvious ones: freezers, book pages, coat pockets, the back of drawers.
• Photograph each room as it is. Ten minutes on a phone. It settles arguments later, it helps with insurance, and it is what an estate sale company will ask for first.

Then, before anything is removed

Let the family take what they actually want, and put a deadline on it. An open-ended "take what you like" stretches for months and the house cannot be sold until it ends. Two weekends is usually enough.

The important part: take what you want, do not remove what you think is worthless. Those are different decisions and only one of them is yours to make cheaply.

What families throw away that they should not

In order of how often it happens and how much it costs:

• The garage and basement. Hand tools, power tools, hardware, fishing and hunting gear. Frequently the highest-value room in the house and almost always the first one emptied into a skip.
• Costume jewelry. Not gold, not silver, and often worth more than either to a collector.
• Paper. Postcards, maps, ledgers, advertising, photographs, sheet music, matchbooks. Nearly weightless, genuinely collectable.
• Holiday decorations. Mid-century Christmas in particular sells extremely well and looks like clutter in a box.
• Anything that is merely dated. Nineteen seventies furniture, barware, lamps and ceramics are in demand right now. "It is not old enough to be worth anything" is wrong more often than it is right.

If you take one thing from this page: get an opinion before you rent a dumpster. It is free, it takes an hour, and it is the single decision with the widest range of outcomes.

Choosing how to sell

There are four ways to clear a house and they suit genuinely different situations. Our sale format tool walks through it in four questions using your own city's housing data, and the commission calculator shows what each offer actually leaves you with once advertising and cleanout charges are counted.

The house itself

In most estates the home is sold once the contents are gone, and the order matters. An empty, clean house photographs better, shows better and appraises better than one being cleared around the viewings. It is worth deciding the contents plan and the listing plan in the same conversation rather than one after the other, because the timing of one constrains the other.