Should a Probate Flat Be Cleaned Before or After the House Clearance?
After. Always after, and if somebody has told you otherwise they’ve either not done one or they’re selling you two visits.
I say that knowing the instinct runs the other way. People ring me first because cleaning feels like the manageable part – a defined job with an end, performed by somebody else, in a flat they’re finding difficult to be in. Clearance is the bit that requires decisions.
But cleaning a full flat is cleaning around forty years of possessions, and every surface you reach is one you’ll have to reach again once the wardrobe’s gone.
Why does the order matter more here than on an ordinary job?
Because probate clearances are slower and messier than any other kind, and the mess arrives in stages nobody schedules.
A house clearance firm empties a flat in a day. A family clearing a parent’s flat takes six weekends, and that’s normal and fine. Boxes come out in batches, somebody’s brother comes down from Leeds one Saturday, the sofa goes on a Tuesday when the man with the van has a slot. Furniture drags across carpet and lifts a strip of grit that’s been under it since 1998. Wardrobes come apart and shed forty years of dust from the top. A mattress goes down the stairs and takes the paint off a corner.
Clean into that and you’re paying twice. I’ve done it – a first-floor flat in Catford where I cleaned throughout on the Thursday and came back four weeks later to find the hall carpet worse than when I’d started, because everything in the flat had been dragged along it.
The second reason is that dirt in a probate flat is under things rather than on them. The kitchen floor behind a fridge that hasn’t moved since the appliance was delivered. The wall behind a wardrobe. That’s where the actual work is and none of it is reachable while the furniture is there.
The exception, and it’s a real one
If the flat smells, or there’s a hygiene issue, or anything organic is involved, something happens immediately and it isn’t a normal clean.
Fridge and freezer contents out on day one, bins out, anything perishable gone, and if there’s been a period of illness or the flat was unattended for a while, that’s a specialist visit before anybody spends a Saturday sorting photographs in there. Nobody should be going through their mother’s paperwork in a flat that smells.
That’s a hygiene intervention, not a clean, and it’s a couple of hours. The proper clean still waits for the clearance.
Who is meant to be doing this, and are they allowed to?
The executor, or the administrator if there’s no will, and the answer to “allowed” is more nuanced than families expect.
Until probate is granted the executor’s authority to deal with the estate is limited, and while it’s normal and sensible to secure a property, clear perishables and make it safe, disposing of contents of any value before the grant is the thing that causes trouble later. Anything that might be worth something – jewellery, a watch, furniture that isn’t flat-pack, pictures, coins, tools, anything anybody in the family has ever mentioned – stays until there’s agreement in writing about what’s happening to it.
The trouble is almost never with strangers. It’s with a sibling who finds out in November that the dining table went to a charity shop in September.
So the sequence that avoids most of it: secure and photograph the flat, deal with hygiene, get a written inventory of anything of possible value, agree in the family who gets what, then clear, then clean, then market.
What insurers want to know about an empty flat
Tell the buildings insurer the property is unoccupied, in writing, on the first week.
Most household policies restrict or void cover once a property has been empty for thirty to sixty days, and probate flats routinely sit for six months. There’s usually an unoccupied-property endorsement available, sometimes at extra premium, sometimes with conditions – heating maintained at a minimum temperature over winter, water drained down, letterbox cleared, visits logged.
Nobody thinks about this and then a pipe goes in January. I’ve been into a flat in Beckenham where the ceiling had come down over a bed nobody had slept in for eight months, and the family were dealing with a leak, a claim and a probate valuation simultaneously.
What does a clean actually add to a probate sale?
Less than the agent will tell you and more than nothing, and where it lands depends entirely on who’s buying.
If the flat is going to market as a doer-upper – “in need of modernisation,” original kitchen, 1970s bathroom, and every viewer is a builder or a developer – cleaning buys you almost nothing. Those buyers price the kitchen at zero and the bathroom at less. What matters to them is access, floor plan, condition of the roof and the lease. A spotless dated kitchen is still a dated kitchen and they’ve already deducted it.
If the flat is presentable and going to an owner-occupier, a clean matters, but the specific version that matters is a light one aimed at the photographs and the viewings rather than a full deep clean of every cupboard.
The thing that genuinely moves a probate flat is emptiness and light. An empty, aired, well-lit flat with the curtains taken down and the bulbs all working reads as a project with potential. The same flat half-cleared, with three boxes in the hall and a stripped bed, reads as sad, and viewers hurry.
What I’d spend the money on instead
Skip and a man with a van, then a window cleaner, then me for half a day.
Windows in particular – probate flats often have nets up and glass nobody’s done in years, and taking the nets down and cleaning both sides changes the light in every room more than anything I do with a mop. Then take the curtains down too if they’re old, because they’ll be heavy, dated and smell of the flat.
Bulbs next. Same colour temperature throughout, every fitting working, including the one in the hall that’s been dead since before.
Then floors and bathroom and kitchen properly and leave the rest. Nobody is opening the airing cupboard at a viewing on a flat like this.
When does the flat need more than a clean?
Three situations, and they’re worth naming plainly because families are usually told about them by somebody standing in the doorway quoting a number.
Smoking, first. Decades of it goes into ceiling and wall paint, and it’s a sugar soap wash followed by a stain-blocking primer and a repaint. No clean fixes it. If the flat smells of smoke from the communal landing, budget for decorating and don’t waste money on the intermediate step.
Second, hoarding or heavy clutter. That’s specialist clearance work with its own risk assessment, and the cleaning happens at the end of a process rather than as part of it. Ordinary house clearance firms will sometimes take it on and then re-quote on the day, which is a horrible conversation to have on a Saturday morning.
Third, any death that wasn’t discovered quickly. Specialist trauma cleaning, immediately, and the family should not be in the flat while it happens or ideally before. Check whether the buildings policy covers it, because some do.
The jobs I turn down
I don’t sort. I don’t value, I don’t decide what’s rubbish, and I won’t be the person who bins something.
That’s a line I drew after a garden flat in Nunhead where I put a chipped mug in a black bag and it turned out to be the only thing in the kitchen anyone in the family actually wanted. Now the rule is that the flat is cleared before I arrive, and anything left in it is either staying or has been marked.
If a family wants somebody to work through the contents with them, that’s a clearance service or a probate specialist, not a cleaner, and the two shouldn’t be sold as one thing.
What order should the whole process actually run in?
Secure, hygiene, valuation, clear, repair, clean, photograph.
Secure means locks checked, keys accounted for, post redirected, insurer told, utilities read and the heating left on a frost setting through winter. Hygiene is the perishables and anything organic, week one. Valuation before clearance if there’s anything of possible worth, and probate valuations of contents are usually needed for the estate return anyway.
Clearance next, in whatever number of weekends it takes. Then any small repairs – the door that doesn’t shut, the missing kitchen handle, the socket faceplate – because those happen best in an empty flat and generate their own dust.
Then me, in an empty flat with the furniture gone and the walls bare, which is a day rather than two and does a better job than anything possible before that point. Then the photographer, the following morning, so the silicone has dried and doesn’t photograph dark.
One practical thing about that final visit. Somebody from the family should be there for the first ten minutes, walk me round, and point at anything ambiguous – the box in the hall, the jars on the windowsill, the pictures leaning against the bedroom wall. Not because I need instructions on cleaning. Because in a flat that’s supposed to be empty, anything left behind was left on purpose, and I’d rather ask.
Take the photographs off the walls yourself before the clearance. Everybody forgets, and then they come down in a box with everything else.