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?

It's more to do with him having more free time than me. He works 0 hours per week and I work 30 hours per week as well as having other obligations to spouse and dc.

@LindorDoubleChoc , I'm surprised that @Notwhatyouwanttohear hasn't reprimanded you for not giving up your job and moving your mother into your home.

We had several people say that to us about DGM. By people who didn't do the same when it was their own parent.

Was in similar position last year but without siblings. My experience was, auction house takes 20% plus VAT, and buyers pay the buyers premium on top (as they would). Most of the items have sold for less than their original valuation but a very few considerably more. There have been entries in about five specialist auctions, but all saleable goods were transported there by a third party firm, so I had no need to hire storage.

however - please be warned about checking cost of emptying house/removal to auction. I was put in touch with someone by the solicitor, and asked his fees - he said he would have a look first and let me know. Didn’t return calls. Next time he rang me, he was half way through the work. Unitemised bill later appears of almost £3k. I had signed nothing. Admittedly the work, whoever I had got to do it (and if there are any steps or stairs at your mothers house OP I would cite that as a real factor not to do it yourselves) would have been around £2k. But I was angry I had been pushed into an agreement without my consent. I do feel it was partly because of my sex.

getting house ready for clearance takes a lot emotionally and physically, and your sibling will likely not have mentioned everything they have done - it’s mentally draining and I suppose I am saying a thank you card and a case of wine when all is in place could go a long way.

Good luck with it all.

Update! And thanks to everyone who replied to me.

DB took no persuading at all once he met the woman from the valuations company. They are doing absolutely everything, packing, rubbish removal, charity shop runs, tip runs, including cleaning through afterwards, for a flat fee. Any money that comes from the auction sales is credited to my mother's account as and when.

He was grateful to me for finding them. I'm so pleased and relieved!

Well done and thanks for the update.

That's fantastic @LindorDoubleChoc ! I'm going to be in this kind of situation reasonably soon, so it's good to know this kind of service is available. How did you find this company? What would I need to Google to find similar?

Oh good! That's great news OP.

Phew.

Had a feeling he would come round when he realised how much work it will save you both, glad it worked out x

Well done. DH thought we could clear his Mum’s house when she went in a care home and had to sell her house. I told him no way could we clear a four bedroom detached house that she had lived in for over 60 years in a weekend! We got a charity to come and take what they wanted, relatives/neighbours to come and get what they wanted and we hired a transit and took what we wanted. Then we paid a clearance company £500 to clear the rest. They came with two large vans and loads of banana boxes. Went through each room clearing everything and were sweeping out the garage two hours later. It was completely worth it!

We sold our parents old house a couple of years ago. Each of us arranged to take what we wanted. DSis and I did an initial clean and then we hired a charity based clearance company. They charged per hour and per the number of vans needed. We cleared the garage of any chemicals ( which was the biggest potential additional cost) but left the rest for them to deal with. They cleared the house then carried out a deep clean, we had no complaints from the buyers so assumed all was satisfactory. We paid about £1400, and we’re happy for any profit from sold furniture to be donated to charity. Most of the furniture, if in good condition is used to help low income to furnish homes. My BIL checked the charity out.
We were all happy that they may continue to be of use and although some were of value the hassle of selling them just wasn’t worth it.
It was a large house so I’m sure it would cost a lot less for a smaller property.
We did spend our time going through all the personal stuff and spent an evening looking at old slides.
We could have used any proceeds to cover the cost of the clearance but chose to pay and allow the charity to keep the profit.

Excellent update @LindorDoubleChoc !

Haven't read the whole thread but you'd be in charge of eBay or FB Market place?

God no no no!!! I wouldn't mind having to take 2 days off and some heavy lifting but hours of work and time wasters on eBay or market place? Not a chance!

Apologies! Have just done one of best hates on mumsnet. Not ready all the OPs posts!!

Glad you had a good resolution!

This is excellent advice and I had to bear exactly this thought in mind when clearing my mother's flat last year with siblings.

As we no longer have any parents alive, no mutual connection, I became keenly aware that engaging in arguments or disputes with siblings that I'm already not close with could result in the end of the relationships forever.

As a trainee solicitor I was involved in administering the estate of a lady who had died with no relatives. Her house contents sounded similar to your DM's. The firm I worked for got a house clearance company to deal with it and I think the estate got about £500 for the lot. The furniture was G Plan, which was quite trendy at the time (and I think still is now), so I expect they would have made a profit selling it on (as you'd expect, being a business operating for profit).

In your shoes I'd probably want to do the same. That said, whilst in the same trainee seat I was involved in the estate of another elderly person - not wealthy - who left his entire estate to a nephew in Australia he'd never met. His only living relative. To be fair to the lad, he did come over to the UK to deal with it. Good job he did, as while clearing the loft he found a vase he thought looked nice, took it to an auction house, and it turned out to be not Ming dynasty but something similar. It sold for ££££££.

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.

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

@Angrymum22 that sounds like a brilliant charity

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.