Selling the Family Home — The Care Compass

This one touches on grief and loss. If reading about it feels like one more thing right now, it'll still be here when you're ready.

In My Own Words

Once Dad passed and we'd had the funeral, we began to look at the will and how it had been structured. He'd been smart, and thoughtful, about it. He'd set the house up as "tenants in common," which meant his half was split between my brother and me, with the other half belonging to Mum. It meant he'd thought ahead, and we were grateful for that. But it also meant the question landed on us quickly: what were we actually going to do with the house?

My brother and I agreed to sit with it for a few days before deciding anything. A few days later, we both knew. It was time to sell the family home.

Clearing the House

We started with clearing it, and it's fair to say Mum and Dad didn't like to part with much. Plates, ornaments, pictures, if there was a space, Mum would fill it. We had our work cut out. I was off work and had made allowances for this part of the process, because I knew, even before we started, that it wasn't going to be quick.

It took several weeks, room by room, reducing things down bit by bit. Endless tip visits, each one booked a day in advance, with a limit of ten a month. At first our approach was pretty conservative, and a lot of emotion was probably clouding our decisions. Then the reality landed: we had no room of our own for any of this. It had to go. Sadly, but it did.

Where we could, we tried to sell things on or find them a good home rather than just clear them. Dad had kept some old farm implements, a mangle, a couple of ploughs, and we found those the right homes rather than a skip. But there was a gap in how we approached it that I'd flag to anyone facing this: we never really knew what was worth something, sentimentally or financially. What would Mum and Dad have wanted us to keep? What could we have sold on properly, if we'd known its value? That's a genuine miss, and one I wish we'd asked about while we still could.

When It Started to Feel Real

The big items were next, and that's when we brought in a removals firm to help clear what was left. That's when it stopped feeling like a task and started feeling real. Rooms that had been full my whole life stood hollow. The kitchen, where Mum and Dad had cooked tea more times than I could count, was just an empty room. Walking into my old bedroom, I could still picture doing homework there, playing computer games with friends after school. Now it was just empty. Sad, honestly.

The thing that kept us on track, through all of it, was a simple question we kept coming back to: could we manage this any other way? The answer was always no. That sanity check mattered. It didn't make it easier, but it kept us moving instead of stuck.

The Sale Itself

The emotional side didn't stop once the house was clear. It started again the moment the estate agent came to value the property, and it stayed with us the whole way through. The house went on the market in January. We'd stretched the asking price a little, and the market told us so, barely any interest for the first few weeks. After seven weeks we dropped the price, and five weeks after that, twelve weeks after first listing, we got our first viewing.

That very first viewing led to an offer, and we agreed the sale from it. We shook hands on it in April. The sale itself didn't complete until September. Start to finish, from the house going on the market to the keys changing hands, it was the best part of a year.

The Paperwork Nobody Warns You About

What genuinely caught me off guard was the sheer amount of paperwork. Between the estate agent and the solicitors, there was a steady stream of forms and letters I'd simply never encountered before, memorandum of sale, various legal documents, and one form in particular that took real time and thought to get through properly.

That's the Property Information Form, known as the TA6, and if you end up selling a property as an executor, you'll meet it too. It's a long questionnaire covering practically every aspect of the house, boundaries, disputes, alterations, guarantees, drainage, parking, and more. Some of it I could answer straightforwardly. Some of it needed real digging to answer properly, and some of it I genuinely couldn't answer with certainty at all.

That last part is worth knowing in advance, because it stopped feeling like a failure once I understood it properly: the Law Society's own guidance for the TA6 explicitly recognises that a seller acting as an executor may not know everything about a property they didn't live in, and it tells you plainly to answer from what you genuinely know and say so clearly when you don't, rather than guess. Your solicitor is there to help you through exactly this, and leaning on them is normal, not a sign you're behind.

Saying Goodbye Properly

I remember going back that final morning before completion. I walked every room, and there was a memory attached to each one. That was my way of saying goodbye properly, I think. Not rushed, not from the car on the way past. One last walk through, room by room, letting each memory be there for a moment before I closed the door.

What I'd tell someone starting this: unless you genuinely have the storage for it, you can't keep everything, and being honest with yourself about that early saves a lot of drawn-out difficulty later. If you can, try to find out what actually holds sentimental or financial value before you start, not partway through. We didn't, and a lot of it became guesswork, trying to remember small conversations from years before. That's the one thing I'd genuinely do differently.

How Long This Really Takes

If there's one thing worth saying plainly, it's this: clearing and selling a family home is rarely quick, and it shouldn't be measured against some imagined timeline. Weeks to clear it. Months, sometimes the best part of a year, to sell it. If you're in the middle of this and it feels like it's dragging, it probably isn't dragging. It's probably just how long it actually takes.

Common Questions

How long does it take to clear and sell a family home?

It varies enormously, but it's often measured in months, not weeks. Clearing a full family home can take several weeks on its own, and the sale itself, from first going on the market to completion, can easily take six months or more, especially if the initial asking price needs adjusting.

What is "tenants in common" and why does it matter for a family home?

Tenants in common is a way of jointly owning a property where each owner holds a defined, separate share, rather than the whole property passing automatically to the other owner when one dies. It allows someone to leave their share of a home to specific people in their will, such as children, rather than it passing entirely to a surviving spouse. Our guide to wills, LPAs and deputyship covers the basics of how wills are structured.

What is the TA6 form, and do I have to fill it in as an executor?

The TA6 Property Information Form is a standard questionnaire about the property, covering things like boundaries, disputes, and alterations, and it's completed by the seller, including an executor selling under a grant of probate. It's not legally compulsory, but skipping it usually causes delays. The Law Society's own guidance recognises executors may not know everything about a property they didn't live in, and advises answering honestly from what you know rather than guessing.

How do we know what's worth keeping or selling from a parent's belongings?

This is one of the hardest parts, and there's no shortcut if it wasn't discussed in advance. Where possible, it helps enormously to ask a parent directly, while you can, what holds real sentimental meaning to them and what they'd be happy to see sold or passed on.

This sits alongside our guide to probate for the legal and administrative side of dealing with an estate, and our guide to grief support if you need that too right now.

You don’t have to navigate it alone.