Cleaning Out the Home of a Loved One

After funerals at funeral homes, one of the first tasks facing family members of a loved one who has died is to clean out their homes. Perhaps the home will be sold as part of the estate, with the proceeds being distributed, along with other financial assets to the heirs of the estate. Or the home may be bequeathed to a family member who is looking for a fresh start when they move in. Or the home may be used as rental property to generate income for the estate.

There are many reasons why we need to clean out the homes of our loved ones after they die, but the task itself may be daunting and seem overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be.

Using some organizational skills and breaking up the home into small, discrete parts to be cleaned will make cleaning it out much easier.

Before starting to clean out the home of a loved one who has died, family members who are involved in this project should take stock of each part of the house. For rooms with multiple parts, such as walk-in closets and bathrooms in bedrooms and pantries in kitchens, each part should be considered, for the purposes of cleaning out, a separate room.

Next, each room should be evaluated to discern how easy or hard it will be to clean out using five categories – get a sheet of paper and write these as column headings. This will help determine the order in which rooms will be cleaned out.

The categories are: Emotional Significance; Room Size; Number of Objects; Open Space; and, Resources. The final column on this sheet of paper should be labeled as “Total.”

Use of simple scale of 1 to 3 for each column. 1 means the room will be easy to clean out, while 3 means the room will be difficult to clean out.

The emotional significance score is a good determinant of where particular rooms will fall in the cleaning out process. If, for example, our loved one died at home in their bedroom or an office or den was the center of childhood memories, then these rooms will score high on emotional significance, and they will not be the rooms you want to start with as you begin cleaning out the home.

Other rooms, such as kitchens or bathrooms, will score lower on the emotional significance scale, and that means they will likely be among the rooms we will start cleaning out first.

Room size is important because the larger the room, the more time it will take to clean out. Garages and basements are often large and they are often full and cluttered. These would score a “3” in the Room Size column.

The fewer things that are in a room, the easier the room will be to clean out. Therefore, the number of objects in a room will also be a determinant in which rooms get cleaned out first.

Open space is important when we’re cleaning out a loved one’s space. Ideally, there will be one room with a lot of open space where items can be sorted as to whether they will go to family, be donated, or go into the trash.

The number of people doing the clean out has a huge impact on how long it will take and how hard the clean out will be. The more hands we have, the faster even the toughest rooms in our loved one’s house will be to clean out.

Total the numbers for each room. Start cleaning in the room with the lowest score and continue the clean out all the way to the room with the highest score. This logical approach will make the clean out faster and easier.

For more information about funerals at funeral homes, our empathetic and knowledgeable staff at Hopler & Eschbach Funeral Home can assist you. You can stop by our funeral home at 483 Chenango St., Binghamton, NY 13901, or you can contact us today at (607) 722-4023.