Estate Cleanouts

You decide what stays. Anything family is keeping gets set aside first and doesn't move until you say so. Everything else comes out — furniture, appliances, closets, the garage, the crawl space, the shed out back.

The house is left empty and swept. If it's headed for sale, that's the condition an agent wants it in before photos.

The sort is also where the personal things surface — documents, photographs, jewellery, the envelope of cash in a coat pocket. Those come to the family. They don't go in the trailer, and nothing that looks like it matters gets thrown out on somebody else's judgement.

Worth separating, because the two get conflated constantly. A cleanout empties the house. Nothing is sold on site, nothing is priced, nobody comes through to shop.

If the contents genuinely have resale value, the estate sale is the better product and it should happen first — the sale runs at the property, and whatever doesn't sell then gets cleaned out. Doing it the other way round means the valuable things left in a trailer.

Not sure which one you have? Say what's in the house on the phone and you'll get a straight answer, including “there's nothing here worth a sale” when that's the truth.

Built-in shelving, a wall of garage cabinets, a stair lift, a finished basement that has to come back to a shell, a hot tub on a deck that also needs to go. On most cleanouts that list becomes somebody else's problem after the trailer pulls out. Here it's one job and one day.

Set at the walk-through, because it depends on the house — how much is in it, how much of it is built in, and how much the family wants to go through first. What you get before anything starts is a date, not a range that moves once the work is underway.