Probate & estate clearance

Clearing a house after a death is not the same job as clearing one after a move, even though the vans and the labour are identical. The difference is that nothing in the house has been sorted by the person who owned it, nobody is quite sure what matters yet, and the people making the decisions are usually doing it in the middle of a difficult few months.

So the work is slower, and it is meant to be.

For families

There is no rush from our side. We would far rather come twice than clear something that should have been kept.

• We work room by room and stop when asked. If you want to be there for some rooms and not others, that is normal.
• Personal items get set aside, not binned. Photographs, letters, documents, medals, jewellery, anything with a name on it. These come to you in a box to go through later — not because we have valued them, but because they are not ours to decide about.
• We will tell you what looks worth something. Furniture, jewellery, coins, tools, a decent watch. If we think it should be looked at by somebody who values things properly, we will say so before it moves.
• You do not have to sort it first. The most common thing people apologise for is the state of the house. It is genuinely fine.

For solicitors, executors and probate firms

If you are administering the estate, the things that usually matter to you are timetable, liability and evidence. All three are straightforward:

• We work to the date you give us, including where that date depends on grant of probate landing first, and we will hold rather than push.
• One point of contact for the whole job, and we are content to deal with you and never with the family, or the other way round, whichever the executor prefers.
• A written note of anything of apparent value found during the clearance, passed to the executor before it is moved. Not a valuation — a list, so the decision sits with the person whose decision it is.
• Waste transfer notes for every load, which is the document that closes off the estate’s duty of care over the contents.
• We invoice the estate and are used to being paid on completion rather than on the day.
• Fully insured, and happy to provide the certificate up front rather than on request.

The thing everybody is too polite to ask

Whether the clearance firm keeps anything valuable it finds.

The answer here is no, and the reason it is worth stating plainly is that it is the single biggest anxiety in this whole job and almost nobody asks it out loud. Anything that looks like it has value is set aside and handed over, whether or not anyone would have known it was there. If that is later sold and the estate is better off, good.

It also means the price for a probate clearance is the price for the work, not a number quietly discounted against what we expect to find in the loft.

Empty properties and insurance

Most estate properties end up unoccupied for a while, and unoccupied-property insurance frequently requires the place to be cleared, secured, and sometimes drained down. If your policy has conditions attached, tell us what they are and we will work to them.