Sibling and I have different approaches to clearing our parent's house - difficult!

I hope the house sale went smoothly and that your mother is settled in her new abode, OP.

Don't put anything into storage. It'll cost a fortune and you will have to clear out from there too for the unwanted items

Sell the valuable items on Facebook. Or advertise an open house sale on x day. Accept offers. Things will not be as valuable as you think. They will be old-fashioned and unsaleable. Once you have done that. Gey a house clearance in for the rest

Read the OP's most recent post.

2 days is enough - get your adult children to help too 🤷‍♀️

Have you asked your brother what really matters to him here? It may be that this isn't about the stuff or money as much as the process and the emotional impact, especially if he has been spending a lot of time here recently. Maybe you could agree to help with the clearance and be with him to say a final farewell to your mother's home, but donate even the valuable unwanted items to a charity you both, or your mother would support.
Sometimes doing this stuff is easier to talk about in terms of practicalities and belongings, but really about being able to manage and move on from difficult times with support without having to be too direct about it. It may turn out to be a great opportunity to connect and share some memories and prepare a bit for how you will both cope with the next phase of your mother's care.

Unless your mums furniture is very modern you will find that people won’t pay a reasonable sum and many will bid you down or not turn up . Many charities will collect for free but sofas etc must have a fire label to be accepted . We found although the house clearance was hard the shared memories brought us all closer sorting through things and when the house was empty we had a toast to our parents and reminisced together .

There’s a storage company near us that will empty a property into one of their units for you. Then you have some time to sort and redistribute. They will even downsize the unit as it empties. A lot cheaper than a lot of removal companies.

Why would the person who is retired expect the person with a nearly full time job to do the time consuming stuff? What is to stop him opening an eBay account?

had to deal with this twice and though you say what you want fits in a box a year down the line you may have many regrets. Due to family problems my partner has said he doesn't want anything of his mum's but I know things may change so I have put photos ornaments etc away in case. with me, my sister took over and I now have a lot of regrets about what I had or rather didn't.
though the auction place sounds good it will be expensive and you don't know if you get the best price auctions can vary sometimes things go for very little especially furniture I know as I regularly sell and buy at auctions. people rarely want dark or brown furniture.
I am really thinking that your sibling has the best idea to go through it together as you really don't know what you will find.
please don't turn visiting your parent into a contest

That's the best outcome for you both. I was going to say to get the clearance company to do it for you too.

Not that much to be honest. Took about 10 items a day to be posted (lots of people bought bundles) and I live in a big town- so that took 20 mins maximum- if it was just 1 or 2 I popped in a locker on the dog walk. Listing takes a couple of minutes per item. Cheapest item was about £15 I sold.

My DM is very much alive. The money went to the 5 grandchildren.

As for putting things in storage, dh and a brother of his ended up putting a mass of their parents’ stuff in storage after the last one died - they couldn’t bear to just chuck so many items that had only sentimental value.
Neither of them lived anywhere near - much of the stuff remained there literally for years - costing ££ per month - until they finally got around to chucking virtually the whole lot. Sometimes you can’t take the logical decision, and sometimes you have to spend money to get to a place you’re comfortable with.

I’m another who’d go for house clearance (having done it both ways).
Remove any sentimental items that anyone wants to keep, first, and do get anything valued if you’re not sure about it.

A Dsis was there when a house clearance firm was doing an old aunt’s house after she’d moved to a care home. She saw them taking more than a very cursory interest in a painting that had been wrapped in brown paper and evidently stored behind a piece of furniture for ages.

So she had it valued. It turned out to be by quite a well known Victorian artist and sold at auction for £9500, which went into the aunt’s pot. I did vaguely remember it from our GM’s house decades previously - she’d probably picked it up at a sale for relative pennies - she’d never had much money.

As for putting things in storage, dh and a brother of his ended up putting a mass of their parents’ stuff in storage after the last one died - they couldn’t bear to just chuck so many items that had only sentimental value.
Neither of them lived anywhere near - much of the stuff remained there literally for years - costing ££ per month - until they finally got around to chucking virtually the whole lot.

What does your mum want?

You’ve made a really sensible decision and I’m glad that you resolved it with your relationship with your brother intact.
I’m preparing a house to sell now a relative has died. It’s all fallen to me. I have let other family members know which dates I will be at the house (it’s a few hours drive from me so not local and I also have 3dc and work full time so it’s not easy to just pop over to the house as and when) and to come and take anything of sentimental value, anything that isn’t collected by x date will be gone.
And I’ve booked someone to come and clear the lot.

Uncluttered or not I think that's going to take you more than a couple of days to do.

From my experience I think you will need a skip there, then go and clear out the personal items/paperwork, take anything you want to keep (let your brother sell it from his house if he's that keen and leave everything else for the house clearance to take.
My late parents house which was a spacious 4 bed house, not huge by any means, didn't look cluttered but every drawer and cupboard was full and it took 2 of us a couple of weeks, several skips, 5 trips from the house clearance man m, countless trips to the auction rooms in vans and even though I was very strict on what I took home with me, I've still got a huge amount of stuff that I'm still working through 3 months in (when I can face it). Good luck

For those saying it’s only two days, it’s not. It’s two days to pack, transport and unload. Then it’s however long it takes to deal with selling everything. OP will have to put up with the inevitable Facebook morons who dick her around too.

Does it matter if you argue with a sibling you're not close to and that then ends the relationship as your only shared thing is a parent who has now gone? Once the estate stuff etc is sorted out?

If you're not close to them then they're not really part of your life? So does it matter?

I can see this happening with my sibling!

But how much time did this take up? I recently sold less than £25 worth of my and DD's old clothes and it took me probably about half an hour to list them on Vinted or EBay, then four trips to the local Evri drop off (30 min round trip before work) because nobody pays or buys at the same time. So at least 2.5 hours of effort to make less than £25.

I'm wondering why you are not hiring a man with the van? You are planning on moving furniture down stairs(?) into a van and out again the other end, wherever that might be, and possibly on again. Where are you going to unload to? What happens if the furniture isn't sold? And who is going to deal with potential buyers while you are at work?
If you can't pay for help, ( but you could out of sale proceeds) hopefully your DH and DC can help? I know you said one DC is away, but could they come for the weekend? I think if you feel this is all too much for you, that's fine, but you need to say so.

@Angrymum22 that sounds like a brilliant charity

Really useful thank you and so glad things worked out well OP

Also thanks for this thread, OP, as it's been very informative.
I have POA (not yet needed happily) for quite a few relatives, and most likely when I'm your age in a few years, I'll probably be in your shoes.