Leaving a house after thirty years

The mistake everyone makes once

Booking the truck first. The move date then becomes a deadline for hundreds of unmade decisions, and the last week turns into triage: things kept because there was no time to decide, things lost because there was no system, and a person exhausted at exactly the moment they're saying goodbye to a home. The truck should be nearly the last thing booked, after the deciding is done.

Pass one · The sort, without a deadline

Start with the rooms nobody lives in, the guest room, the garage, under the stairs. Four labels, one decision per object: coming, to family, to sale or donation, decide later. The fourth label is not cheating; it's the pressure valve that keeps the other three honest. Aim for one room per session, not one weekend for the house.

Two practical rules from watching many of these: photograph things before you give them away (the photo keeps the memory, the cousin gets the sideboard, everyone wins), and let the floor plan of the new place veto furniture early, a measured plan beats optimism about where the second sofa might fit.

Pass two · The first run

The to family and donation piles leave the house weeks before the move. This is usually a small-crew day, a van or the two-mover truck making a loop of relatives and the charity dock. The house gets visibly lighter, the remaining decisions get easier, and the main move, the one billed by the hour with the big crew, has just shrunk.

Pass three · The move, now a normal move

What's left is the real household: the coming-with pile, packed and labelled for the new home's actual rooms. From here it runs like any surveyed move, access walked, truck matched, carry planned, except smaller and calmer than it would have been. If the new place is an apartment, the lift gets booked and the pieces get checked against its doors before the day, half our downsizes land in Rose Bay and Double Bay, so we know those lobbies well.

Pass four · The final sweep

The decide-later pile has an appointment with honesty: a short session, weeks after the first sort, when most of it turns out to be donation after all. What remains goes to storage under an inventory if it's genuinely undecidable. Then the house is cleared for the agent or the family, and the keys change hands without a skip-bin panic in the front yard.

If you're the son or daughter organising this

Three things help more than anything else: agree WHO decides (one voice for the household, even if the whole family talks), keep every arrangement in writing so nothing rests on a tired memory, and protect the person moving from decision fatigue, two hours of sorting is a session, six is a mistake. We're used to being briefed by one person and gentle with another; say so in the enquiry and we'll work that way from the first call.