A Room-by-Room Plan for Clearing Out a Parent's Home

Before anything leaves the house

Clearing out a parent's home is rarely only a hauling job. It usually follows a death, a move to assisted living or a decision to sell, and it lands on adult children who have jobs, families and grief of their own. The first days are well spent on things that cannot be undone later: securing the house, agreeing among family members on who makes decisions, and finding the papers that matter before anything is moved.

Anderson has a lot of these houses. Census figures put 19.3 percent of the city's residents at 65 or older, and half of its homes were built before about 1961. Many of those houses have held one family for decades, and their basements, attics and garages show it. A realistic plan starts by walking every room, including the crawl spaces, and making a rough list of what is there before deciding what happens to it.

Find the papers and valuables first

Before any sorting for disposal, the family should make a dedicated search for documents and valuables. Wills, deeds, vehicle titles, insurance policies, bank and retirement statements, tax records, keys, jewelry, cash and photographs turn up in desk drawers, but also in books, coat pockets, freezer bags and boxes in the basement. Older parents often kept important papers in more than one place.

Anything that stores personal information deserves the same care. Old computers, phones and tablets can hold banking details, photos and passwords, and the drives need to be wiped or removed before the devices leave. Medications should be gathered up and set aside for a take-back program rather than thrown out with a cleanout load. Once this search is done, the rest of the house can move faster, because the risk of losing something irreplaceable has dropped.

Sort in the right order

Start with the rooms that hold the most personal items, usually the bedroom, a home office and any room with a desk or filing cabinet. These take the longest because each decision matters. Kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms come next and move faster. Basements, attics, garages and sheds go last: they hold the heaviest and most mixed material, from tools and holiday decorations to paint cans and chemicals, and they are easier to face once the rest of the house is done.

A staging area near the front door keeps the process moving. Five groups cover almost everything: keep, give to family, donate or sell, recycle, and discard. Colored tape or sticky notes on furniture help when several relatives are choosing pieces, and photographs let family members who live out of town claim items without traveling. Setting a date by which choices must be made keeps the job from stalling.

What the city will take, and what it will not

Anderson's city services can carry part of the load, and using them first saves money. The trash cart goes out weekly and the recycling cart every other week on trash day, and the recycling cart takes all types of plastic, glass, cardboard, paper and metal cans. Flattening boxes and filling that cart on its week keeps a surprising amount of cleanout material out of any paid haul.

For large items, the city's Heavy Pick-Up collects things too big for a cart, such as furniture and appliances, the day after trash day once it is arranged with the city's trash contractor. It excludes anything that ever held Freon, such as refrigerators, freezers and air conditioners, along with remodeling debris and excess move-in or move-out trash. A few pieces of furniture fit the program well. The full contents of a house do not, and that is where a hauler or a dumpster comes in.

Items that need their own route

Some of what turns up in an older house cannot go out with household trash at all. Old TVs, computer monitors and computers are covered by Indiana's E-Cycle rules and have to be recycled, as the post on getting rid of an old TV in Madison County explains. Refrigerators and freezers need their refrigerant recovered, and the Madison County Recycling Center accepts them. Half-empty cans of oil-based paint, solvents, pesticides and pool chemicals belong at that same center's household hazardous waste collection.

Tires go to the county center or the transfer station, since whole tires cannot be landfilled in Indiana. Mattresses are a special case: the county center does not accept them, so they go through a scheduled pickup, the transfer station or a hauler. Setting all of these aside in their own corner of the garage as they turn up makes the final trips far simpler.

Donation, and when to bring in help

Clean, sound furniture, working appliances and leftover building materials can often go to reuse. Habitat for Humanity of Madison County's ReStore in Chesterfield sells donated furniture, appliances and building materials, and calling ahead with photos saves a wasted trip, since reuse stores turn away stained, broken or pest-affected items. Families with furniture, tools or collections of real value sometimes hold an estate sale first and donate what is left.

Help makes sense when the house is large, when stairs and basements are involved, when family members live far away, or when a sale or lease sets a deadline. A crew can empty a house in a day or two, sort donations and recycling as it goes, and leave the rooms broom clean. The page on estate and house cleanouts describes how those jobs are planned and priced, and families can request junk removal in Anderson once the papers and keepsakes are safely out.

More from the blog

• Getting Rid of an Old TV or Monitor in Madison County