Almost nothing has to be decided this week
The pressure to start emptying a house usually arrives long before it is actually necessary. Unless the property has already sold or there is a hard date from a landlord or a mortgage company, the contents can wait. What cannot wait is securing the house and finding the paperwork.
Working in the wrong order is the one mistake that is expensive to undo. Things thrown out cannot be recovered, and documents found after the furniture has gone are documents found too late.
If the property is in California, emptying an inherited house in California covers the authority, insurance and regulatory questions that come first.
Secure the property first
This is the part that has a deadline, and it is usually the part nobody thinks about.
- Change or rekey the locks if keys are unaccounted for.
- Contact the property’s insurer and ask how an unoccupied home affects coverage. Vacancy provisions vary by policy, so this is a question for that specific insurer rather than something to assume in either direction. The California Department of Insurance publishes consumer information on homeowner policies.
- Forward or hold the mail, so statements and bills stop piling up in a visible stack by the door.
- Keep the utilities on. Heat, light and water are what let you work in the house, and a house with the water off in winter is a house with a plumbing bill waiting.
- Take photographs of every room before anything moves. This costs ten minutes and settles most later arguments about what was where.
Find the paperwork before you move the furniture
Documents live in furniture. Desks, filing cabinets, bedside drawers, the backs of picture frames, the insides of books, freezers and the pockets of coats. If the furniture leaves first, the paperwork leaves with it.
- The will, any trust documents, and anything naming an executor or trustee.
- Deeds, vehicle titles, and any certificates of ownership.
- Insurance policies, pension and annuity paperwork, tax returns.
- Safe deposit box keys and any record of which bank holds the box.
- Bank, brokerage and credit card statements, enough to know what accounts exist.
- Cash. It is more common than people expect, in envelopes, tins, books and coat pockets.
Sort into a small number of decisions
The reason clearing a house stalls is that people try to make a separate decision about every object. A house has thousands of objects and nobody has thousands of decisions in them.
Use as few categories as you can stand. Keeping, going to a named person, worth selling, donate, dispose, and undecided. The undecided pile is not a failure, it is the mechanism that lets you keep moving.
Once the keeping is settled, the next decision is whether the rest is a sale or a removal. Estate sale or estate cleanout is the test for that.
Settle who gets what before anything is sold
Distribution among family is the part that causes lasting damage, and it is much easier before items are priced. Once something has a number attached, the conversation changes.
If there are several heirs, write a list, circulate it, and let people claim in turn. It feels bureaucratic and it prevents the version of this where one person empties the house and everybody else finds out later.
What people regret throwing out
Photographs and letters, almost always. Also military records, diaries, recipe books in a family hand, and the negatives and slides nobody could view at the time.
Set aside anything with handwriting or a face on it and decide later. It takes one box and it is the box people are grateful for.
The same instinct is worth applying wider than sentiment. What not to throw away before an estate sale covers the categories where an item can be worth money for a reason that is not visible from looking at it.
Doing it yourself
Plenty of families do, and it is a reasonable choice when the contents are modest, there is no deadline, and somebody lives close enough to spend weekends on it.
Budget more time than seems plausible. The physical work is not the slow part. The slow part is decisions, coordinating between heirs, and finding out what a given item is actually worth before you give it away.