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

[LindorDoubleChoc]

My mother has sold her house to pay for care home fees and my one sibling and I have to deal with getting rid of the contents by completion (mid November).

Sibling lives 1.5 hours drive away from this house and I live 2.5 hours drive away.

Sibling is 66, retired and lives alone. I am 61 and work 30 hours pw and have a dh and two adult children although one is only 20 and at University but still requires quite a bit of input in some ways.

Mum's house is small and uncluttered but still filled with most of her possessions including the larger pieces of furniture. Two of these are worth about £300 to £400 each, the rest are just fairly standard items (maybe 10 of them) with a re-sale value of maybe £20 to £50 per item being optimistic.

Sibling wants to hire a van for two days (£126) and for the two of us to clear her house in those two days, including taking things to the dump, taking things to the charity shop, then filling the van with her possessions, bringing them up to the town where we live, hiring a storage facility and selling her furniture from here on EBay or FB Marketplace.

Otoh, I have found an estate valuations company who could do the whole lot for us. They will separate out the valuable things and send them to an auction house locally. They will pack and clear the house and charity/dump/or recycle as appropriate for absolutely everything. I don't know what they will charge and it may not be covered by the value of the auctionable items but I feel it will be worth it for the lack of work involved!

For myself, anything I want to keep could fit in one small box and the back of my estate car.

The trouble is my sibling has done a lot more hours already in selling the house (DIY in getting it up to scratch, a lot more visits to our parent in the last 9 months in the care home, dealing with the sale etc). I really couldn't be more grateful to him for the effort.

But I am just utterly daunted by the prospect of those two days before the sale completes. I have to take 2 days days leave from work as they are mid-week. And then the enormous chore of selling things. He is not on social media or Ebay so expects me to handle all that.

Sorry it's long. What do people think?

Why do you have to do it just before sale? Can you and your sibling go say this weekend and do the charity shop bagging up and tip runs? Take photos for eBay and get ready to go.

I see your siblings point of view - I know two different people who are annoyed after using one of those house clearance companies that valuable items were not properly sold, that items weren’t sorted.

Honestly given she did the lions share up to now , I'd suck it up for two days.
It does read a bit like it's fine for her as she has no family but as you have two adult children you think you should get a pass. I mean really it's just one weekend .

This is something I have dealt with twice very recently. It was awful and I don't blame you for wanting to have as little involvement as possible.

I don't think this is a complicated situation because either way, it sounds like there won't be much money to be made for anyone involved. As you said, who knows how much it would cost to hire a company to take care of everything. Maybe you'd make some money back on selling things, but unless your mother was secretly an aristocrat, it probably wouldn't be much! Maybe enough to pay for the company.

So from your perspective, it doesn't matter whether the company does everything or your brother does. I'd tell him that the bottom line is you don't want to deal with it. Either he can do everything himself (maybe he knows people who can help) and keep any money he makes from selling things or you can all hire a company.

You say that he has already done a lot of work so I think it would be fair that whatever solution you all come up with benefits him financially more than anyone else. Good luck!

So your brother expects you do all the selling, but you don’t want to?

Well I wouldn’t want to either, so I think you have the final say here.

The best bit of advice I got from Mumsnet when clearing my mum's house with a sibling, when things get conflicted think of the future relationship you want with the sibling, and is this conflict worth jepordising that.

Two days heavy lifting with good Grace, may be cheap in the long term.

Can you go to the house at all evenings or weekends and take photos of items you want to sell and put on FB marketplace? We sold so much like that.

I think the problem is you don't know what they will charge- can they not tell you in advance?

Why do the days have to be midweek? Have you factored in the cost of storage? It may be more than the items are worth.

Can’t you take the auctionable items directly to the auctioneer, or get them to pick them up?
Your brother could do some of the donkey work for selling the other items by getting them presentable, researching prices, taking photos, writing descriptions, working out postage costs (if needed) etc, then it is easier for you to upload. He could be responsible for dispatching sold items too.

I suspect your brother has no idea what a faff it is selling large items on ebay/marketplace, or how uncertain it is. You are likely to raise the lower end of your estimates, it will take a lot of time (your time, which you haven’t got) and expense (have you costed up storage? The price of selling on ebay?) and even then the £ should go into your mother’s bank account where it will make barely any difference compared to the proceeds of the house. Does he know this?

The auction house route may not make as much money, but the job will be done all at once.

It’s tricky given he’s done the heavy lifting so far, but his plan really is unrealistic. Are there any other ways you can lift the load for him? Who will be living closest to your mum in the future?

Completion date is set now and I'm not going to get into trying to alter that. Also, one of the days I work is a Saturday.

We're going to the house tomorrow (my one day off this week) and meeting the valuations company there. I'll have a better idea then.

I don't really mind the idea of my sibling and I moving everything from a 2 bedroom house into a van (no "man" included in this van hire) in 2 days (although we're both in our 60s) but then the idea of unloading it at the dump, then the charity shop, then at the other end, paying for storage, and trying to sell it all afterwards! Not to mention packing it all up.

Care is £1700 pw, after van hire and storage, how much are we going to make? 1 week's care if that.

Yes, any proceeds will go to our Mum's bank account. He's only trying to make money for her, but I think he hasn't thought about it deeply enough. He is closer to her and probably holds a lot more sentimental attachment to her belongings but, again, whatever he wants to keep from the house could easily be fit in his car or my car.

I think the auction house route is the way to go, but understand that it could be an issue for your DB.

I just don’t think there’s going to be much money to gain from what could be months of faffing around trying to deal with selling things online. People will be trying to negotiate an ever lower price, not showing up etc etc. Plus the cost of moving and then storage. For sure I’d like to know how the auction house charges. It is a set fee, or a percentage based off what they make? And I imagine if it ends up costing, that that cost would be paid from the proceeds of the sale of the home.

It's a horrible job OP, and one I've done twice now. No simple solutions that I know of. Do try and talk to your brother though. DSis and I fell out badly when clearing my DMs house and we have not recovered after more than 10 years. Good luck.

Not easily. He lives 50 miles away. I live 75 miles away ...

Having been through this twice relatively recently with my grandmother and with four of us involved (her three children and me), and then FIL with his father's house (five people doing clearing) I'd say house clearance.

We did I it ourselves and one or two people always end up doing more work than the others and the financial rewards are negligible.

The trouble is my sibling has done a lot more hours already in selling the house (DIY in getting it up to scratch, a lot more visits to our parent in the last 9 months in the care home, dealing with the sale etc). I really couldn't be more grateful to him for the effort.

Then giving up a single weekend to support him is the least you can do.

A compromise is that the halfway decent stuff could be taken straight to the auction house rather being put in storage and you selling it on eBay. I really don't think he realizes how much storage costs, how much work eBaying is, and how little you'd get.

I'd give up my weekend willingly, given the amount of work and time that he's put in so far, but contact the auction house and arrange for everything that isn't for the tip or the charity shop to be taken straight there.

And yep. I'm his age, retired and alone. I can't imagine how hard it's been for him to do all this work and visiting without the support of a partner. It bothers me that you think that your time is worth more than his, and that it's somehow harder for you. Organisationally, maybe it is, a little. Emotionally? While you appreciate what he's done, it feels like you don't appreciate the emotional toll of it on him.

You need to step up and support him, practically and emotionally.

This is what I want to avoid! I don't think we are going to disagree on who has what, just how to handle this next few weeks. As he is older and male (don't know why pp assumed it was a sister) he kinda always thinks he's in charge.

It's two days, suck it up. He's already done all the heavy lifting sorting things out.

I would not risk a hernia or a lifetime of back pain for 1 weeks' care home fees. Get the professionals in. If you try to sell on eBay buyers will want you to deliver etc.

I’ve done this. Be very realistic that the furniture may not sell at all - what then? At least if the house clearance company deal with it, it becomes their problem. We ended up donating everything except furniture to Anglo Doorstep collections, who picked it up from the doorstep. Furniture went on Freecycle or in the skip.

I'd suck this one up, but look for ways to make it easier on you.

What about you taking a week off, going down there together and doing as much on site as you can? Do a yard sale, get info on local jumble sales and charity shops, and flog the big items on FB immediately. See if your sibling will agree that anything left after that week could go to house clearance.

I would definitely try to convince your brother about the valuations company. A friend of mine does this. The amount of effort that goes into the selling of items alone is considerable.

Agree with PermanentTemporary...

Also, this is what we were doing this time last year. (OH is an only child and his mother is in a care home). It was very time consuming and hard work - so many timewasters to deal with too! Unfortunately, you don't have much time now to sort out the house, so your best option is going to be a clearance company.

Try to price up storage options too, to present to your brother. It feels like he has done most of the hard work up to now.

Ok, so the facts are:

You get on
You both want to do the best for your Mum
He is not working and has done more so far and you DO recognise this

Partly, he has done more because he can and you can't, due to your differing situations - how much does he acknowledge this?

Your experience (okay, a LOT of people's experience, but you can try to flog a couple of things now, if needed, on FB / eBay, so you can honestly speak from experience) is that selling lots of not super valuable stuff is time consuming and not always straightforward.

Time which you do not have.

There are also storage costs to take into account.

Not to mention that different charity shops have different acceptance criteria.

How many people do you and he know who have successfully done what he currently is floating?
How many people get in auction houses / house clearance firms?
Most likely the answer is "um actually none" and "oh quite a lot when I come to think of it".

Why does he think that is?

Do you even have the time to teach him how to use eBay and FB marketplace?

You have to sit him down and say, "Bro, I can't see that the current plan will work, let's talk this through so we both find a solution we think is solid. I promise I'll listen to you if you listen to me."

Ultimately I think the priorities are:

• Your relationship surviving
• You both retaining the sentimental items you want
• House sale going through
• Not ending up LOSING significant money on clearing the house

It will take some time to talk him through what the likely reality of his plan is, but time well spent if he's just a bit disappointed at the end rather than mad at you.