Is anyone else going through house clearance after death?

[ClearingAHouse]

I'm not sure where to put this and 'Bereavement ' doesn't seem appropriate. Is anyone else struggling with this?

I did my mums ten years ago after she was killed in a car accident. That was hard.
But ten times worse was clearing PIL house last year. It took four, sometimes five of us every Saturday for a complete six months. I cannot begin to describe the shit and clutter. Skip after skip. It left a very poor legacy.

I did this for my sister who lived 200 miles away and died in her mid forties unexpectedly. My parents couldn’t face it, and she had named me in her will as she assumed our parents would die before us.
She had autism, and was a hoarder. I couldn’t walk through her doorway without starting to cry.
it’s not something I’d ever thought of before to be honest, and it was one of the hardest things I can imagine. I felt like I was intruding on her private space and possessions, as she was a fiercely private woman. Pretty broken hearted just thinking about it actually. Sending best wishes to anyone experiencing this right now.

Not currently but have had to do parents, parents in law and sister all in the past 4 years. I’m in process of doing my own ‘death clean’ currently though…don’t want to lumber DS with it.

There's been a number of threads on this topic recently. I won't bore you all with my experience again.

But this is what my parent's house was like. Took 18 months all told even with handing over to house clearance once I was happy I had found the most important bits. Totally feel your pain and still find it quite traumatic 6 months on.

Did exactly the same after clearing DPs house @Mum2Fergus - did a massive clear out then and regularly purge my wardrobes, kitchen cupboards etc…

My dad passed away and then my mum got diagnosed with vascular dementia soon after. Looked after her alone (only child, her family vile) and had the double whammy of grieving my dad and also living grief for my mum. It was the hardest thing to do and seemed like a never ending task as she had to be moved into a care home. I am trying not to hoard and have regular clear outs as don't want to put my son in same position when my time comes.

I'm having to do this with DH's things and I'm moving from our rented house to a rented apartment 25% of the size. I'm dismantling his life bit by bit and it feels disloyal and disrespectful- but I cannot live like he's still here. He worked from home and had hobbies I don't share. I also realise now that he hung on to stuff because we have space to store it, even if we would never need it. Our broadband package comes with a router, tv box and landline phone and we have the gear from the previous contract that ran from 2022-2024 as well as the current one, for example.

I also have to deal with all his motorcycle stuff and diving stuff, as well as selling his car and the bike itself. I started with his clothes and only kept a bunch of work shirts that I plan to use for quilting.

I'm just starting out here after my dad died earlier this month. I just planned to get a house clearance company but I hadn't realised how much effort there would need to be in terms of identifying things we wanted to keep eg photos. Neither my sibling nor I live anywhere near his house and we both have busy lives which makes it harder.

Started on Mums stuff in April, still at it

In one respect I was lucky as she lived with us so no major panic to get things done, but she was a war baby and the hoarding of everything has just been so heartbreaking

But its been so hard, like others have said, its like Im throwing mum away and I have had no siblings help , just DH

However as we have done each room we have decorated and reconfigured the house and whilst we did that, we started our own death clean , whole rooms are now empty of furniture and belongings and we have put the house on the market to downsize

Just the personal papers and photos to go through now , the things I put away to deal with later, later. is now here while things are still raw

It’s so difficult.

My parents had so much stuff, 4 big filing cabinets full of paperwork that we still haven’t fully sorted through. Multiple crates of photos. Felt awful binning most of those but they aren’t my memories. A whole room filled with craft supplies and stationery. A garage full of “useful bits of wood”. Hundreds and hundreds of books. We scanned them all onto the buying apps and got about £30. It was not worth the time it took. So many ornaments…

I only wanted a very few things but we’ve somehow also ended up with a clock, a bookcase, two side tables, a few ornaments and the garage full of —crap— useful stuff because my husband decided he wanted it!

I just got what I wanted and employed a service to do the rest. It was only a few hundred and they completely cleared it ready for sale.

It’s awful isn’t it?

We had to do this while PIL were still alive but in a care home with dementia. They had lived in that house the whole of DH’s life, and there were lots of storage places, so there was 50 years worth of old bedding to get rid of, a full loft etc. Nightmare. And very hard for DH as a lot was part of his childhood. So many trips to charity shops, the tip, and the post office for Ebayed stuff.
Like a PP said, we don’t want the same for our DC so we are getting rid of stuff now.

I did it a few months ago and it was horrendous. I knew there was a lot of stuff but when we cleared the loft and the garage it was shocking. Even the house clearance guy said it was the biggest job he had ever done and the house was a small 3 bed semi!

The other thing was my siblings wanted to go through everything and I wanted to just clear it straight away. They were sentimental about everything and I wasn’t.

People don’t talk about it do they? Look how many people on this thread have done it recently and find it really hard.

Sorry to cut in on the OP…but given there are a few people here who have mentioned doing, or preparing to do, their own ‘death clean’ - would it merit a support thread in its own right?

One for those on their own journey through their own possessions.

Quite possibly yes. I would join a thread here whereas I wouldn't on eg the Hoarders board.

i'm not so much 'death cleaning' at my house, more trying to just reduce clutter & stuff, but also aiming to clear / modernise parts of the house to make it easier to live in as we get older and/or sell later. I'm aware how much trouble it has given me that DP's house is unmodernised (eg plumbers won't touch the central heating) so don't want that for us.

How long is a piece of string ?
It's very much going to depend on how big the house is and how much clutter / hoarding there is on the side of clearing the house, and how much the executor knows about the estate and whether there is IHT to pay in terms of probate timescales. Also how local you are - we live hundreds of miles away so have had to do it in bursts of weeks at a time as we can.

From my current experience - mum died in mid-june and I spent the week or so after her death in the house notifying all the relevant companies and arranging the funeral, We then came back for around three weeks around the funeral in mid-July doing an initial sort of the house contents. They weren't great hoarders so it wasn't too onerous a task apart from the paperwork - dad (who had died a couple of years earlier) dealt with everything by post / hardcopy and kept everything going back decades in the form of bills, invoices, letters, payslips etc.
We went through all the rooms and found all the sentimental / personal items I wanted to keep and got them out the house. As I'm the only surviving family member and sole beneficiary I don't need to consult with anyone else which greatly speeds things up. I also got three estate agents round to value the house.

I then spent time filling in the IHT forms (there is no IHT to pay but I needed to claim the additional residential IHT allowance) , and could send those off to HMRC by the beginning of September. Although they say allow up to 12 weeks, I got a response from them in early October giving the go-ahead to apply for probate, which I did straight away and although that also suggests a timescale of up to twelve weeks that came through just over a week later.

So just over four months between death and getting probate. You don't need to have probate to get the house on the market, just to exchange contracts. We're now down for another week decluttering the house ready for it to go on the market. We're leaving most of the furniture but putting a lot of the ornaments etc in the garage and will get house clearance in once we have a sale.

Hope this gives some idea - but as I say it;s going to be a very individual experience depending on circumstances, amount of clutter, family dynamics etc. .