Clearing an estate: the first few days

An estate clearing is not a decluttering job. It is a legal and financial process that happens to involve furniture. The order below is designed so that nothing irreversible happens in the first week.

1. Nobody throws anything away yet

Walk through every room with a camera and photograph it as it is. Open the drawers and photograph inside them. This record is worth more than it sounds: it locates documents, identifies valuables nobody mentioned, and settles later disagreements about what was in the house.

Then lock the house, or at least the room with the paperwork in it.

2. Find the paperwork

Look for the will, the deed, insurance policies, bank and investment statements, pension documents, tax returns, and any list of accounts. Look in the obvious places first, then the less obvious ones: the freezer, under the mattress, inside books, in the garage.

Give everything you find to the executor or the solicitor. Do not distribute anything, and do not promise anything to anybody, until the will has been read.

3. Separate the four kinds of value

• Legal value: documents, deeds, keys, account details.
• Cash value: jewellery, silver, tools, collections, anything a dealer would pay for.
• Sentimental value: photographs, letters, family objects. Photograph them, then let people choose.
• Bulk: furniture, clothing, kitchen goods, the contents of the garage.

4. Get one professional opinion before the vultures arrive

If there is jewellery, silver, art, a coin collection or a stamp collection, have one qualified person look at it before you accept any offer. "I'll take it off your hands" is not a valuation.

For the rest, a local dealer's offer is usually wholesale — a fraction of what the item would sell for retail — because they are taking on the risk and the storage. That is not a scam, it is the price of not doing it yourself.

5. Then the bulk

Donation first for anything usable, then hauling for what is left. Get two quotes for hauling and ask what the fee includes. Empty the refrigerator, disconnect the appliances, and photograph the meter readings before the utilities are closed.

Keep the keys, the garage door openers and the alarm codes together, and hand them over formally when the house is sold.

This is general practical guidance, not legal or tax advice. Estate rules differ by state; use the executor and a solicitor for the decisions that bind.