When a loved one dies, there is a lot of practical, organizational things that need to be done.
Clearing out their home and deciding what to do with all their stuff can be a very daunting and emotional task.
Olivia (name changed for privacy) found the experience somewhat overwhelming when she first helped her father downsize following her mother’s death, and then again after he died less than a year ago.
“[It is a] mountain of stuff that you have to work through,” the 40-year-old Sydneysider said.
“Even though my parents’ didn’t have a load of stuff, they still had a lifetime of stuff.”
Olivia says she was lucky because she didn’t have any arguments with her two brothers about who got what of their parents’ possessions, but it was still tough to know how to dispose of a house full of things.
“My parents had furnished their home with antique furniture that a relative of my dad had brought out from England when they arrived in Australia,” she says.
“That furniture had a lot of sentimental value to my dad, [but] it’s not the kind of furniture that any of us kids would have.”
Lynette Brigden runs a business that helps families deal with a lifetime of stuff when someone dies or needs to downsize and move into care.
She says it’s always going to be an emotional experience and can be overwhelming.
“You just can’t keep everything,” she told Philip Clark on ABC’s Nightlife program.
“You have a whole house full of stuff and most people can’t absorb that into their house, because they’ve already got a whole house full of stuff. So you do have to be a bit brutal.”
Here are some tips on how to go about packing up a lifetime of stuff.
Start in one room and make piles
Ms Brigden’s first tip is to start to pack up an area of the house that doesn’t get used too much, something like a spare bedroom or office is a great place to start.
Go through everything in the room and make a decision with every item, placing them in a pile to keep, sell, give away or send to the tip.
Olivia says her mother’s advice, after dealing with her grandmothers’ possessions, was to move through the non-sentimental things quickly, stuff like cutlery, toiletries and linen and so on.
“Because the longer you leave it, the greater attachment you get to things that you otherwise wouldn’t have had attachment to,” she says.
How quickly you have to go through everything will depend greatly on your situation.
When Olivia was helping her father downsize, they had a long time to go through everything and work out what to do with it. But when he died, the retirement home needed his accommodation from him to be free within two weeks, meaning Olivia and her brothers from her had to move fairly quickly.
Does anyone want brown furniture?
[photo of brown furniture]
When you’re making your piles you might have to put more in the give-away pile than you want to.
“I’ve just donated a deceased estate and it had a lot of brown furniture and I ended up giving a lot of it away,” Ms Brigden says.
“People are happy to take the brown furniture if it’s free.”
Fashion in furniture comes and goes, and generally people will only want your grandad’s old dining table if it’s in really good condition.
However, to avoid tip fees and reduce the amount of stuff that ends up in landfill, Ms Brigden recommends giving as much of the old furniture items away for free as you can.
She recommends using local area Facebook Groups, Gumtree or sites like Street Bounty to list what you have to give away.
Opshops and charities will often take good quality items of furniture, clothing, some books and kitchen items, but they will only want things in very good condition and they may not take everything you want to give them.
Old bed frames can often be donated, but old mattresses are best off sent to recycling.
Ms Brigden says donating books to a street library can be a great way to give those books a new life.
Is this actually worth anything?
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One of the piles Ms Brigden always makes is the garage sale pile, which can be a relatively easy way to make some cash from unneeded possessions.
You can also list items for sale online on places such as Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree, eBay and so on, if you have the time and capacity to do that.
Nightlife talkback caller, Mark, says he struck it lucky when he went through the boxes of stuff his grandmother left behind.
“I inherited a Phantom comic collection, which I recently was able to sell for $1,300,” he says.
“My advice would be to go through everything and do some internet research.”
Another option that might work, says Ms Brigden, is to get someone from an auction house to come and go through the house to help you work out what might sell, or send photos of items to an auction house and ask for valuation.
But often the really important items are the ones that hold no monetary value, but still mean the world to you.
Olivia says the most valuable things she kept are pieces of her mum’s writing.
“There’s a card, there’s a couple of articles my mum wrote, there’s some emails. Re-reading those, they’re so strongly in her voice it brings her back.”
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