You are clearing a parent's or relative's house.
Inventory before you decide anything
The instinct is to start sorting immediately, because the house feels overwhelming and doing something feels better than looking at it. Resist it long enough to make a list.
A room-by-room inventory that the whole family can see is the thing that prevents the argument later. It is much easier to agree who gets what from a shared list than from a memory of a Saturday afternoon.
The pressure to get it on the market
There is almost always someone — an agent, a sibling, a solicitor — applying pressure to get the property empty and listed. That pressure is what causes things to be disposed of that somebody would have wanted.
A house that sits for a fortnight longer while a family agrees is not a financial catastrophe. A box of photographs in a skip is not recoverable.
Multiple destinations are normal
Almost nothing on a probate clearance goes to one place. Items go to family members in different parts of the country, to auction or resale, to a charity, and some genuinely to disposal.
Tell your remover this at the outset. A clearance planned as multi-destination from the start is packed and labelled for it; one planned as a single move has to be re-sorted on a driveway.
- One list, shared, before anything moves.
- Mark each item with its destination, not just its room.
- Photograph anything contentious before it is moved.
- Keep disposal documentation — you may need to account for it to the estate.
The loft, and what is actually in it
On a probate clearance the loft is the largest unknown in the job, and it is frequently the most significant. Paperwork, photographs, wartime effects, things put up there by a previous generation and never looked at since.
Go up before the survey if you can do it safely, or ask us to. What is up there changes both the scale of the job and, quite often, what the family wants to keep.