If you’ve just been handed the keys to a parent’s or relative’s home in Adelaide, the most useful thing we can tell you is this: don’t throw anything out for the first two weeks. Take photos, lock the doors, and give yourself time to find the documents, the will, and the small things that turn out to matter. Once you’ve done that, a deceased estate cleanout becomes a sequence of decisions you can work through methodically — keep, family, sell, donate, remove — usually over two to four weekends, or one big week if you’re flying in from interstate.

We’ve cleared hundreds of estates across Adelaide, from two-bedroom units in Glenelg to family homes in Burnside that haven’t been touched in fifty years. This is the process we walk families through, written down so you can do as much or as little of it yourself as you want.

Before you start: probate, valuables, and the two-week pause

Before a single bag goes in the bin, a few things need to happen.

Locate the will and confirm the executor. The executor has the legal authority to deal with the contents of the estate. If you’re not the executor, you need their written sign-off before disposing of anything beyond obvious rubbish (mouldy food, expired medication, green waste).
Apply for probate if required. In South Australia, probate is generally needed if the estate holds real property or significant assets. Your solicitor or the Probate Registry of the Supreme Court of SA can confirm. A cleanout can usually begin before probate is granted, but a sale of the property cannot settle without it.
Notify the insurer. Most home and contents policies have an “unoccupied” clause that kicks in after 60 or 90 days. Call the insurer, tell them the situation, and ask what’s required to keep cover in place during the cleanout.
Change the locks or at least the alarm code. You’d be surprised how many people have a key.

Then, the pause. For the first two weeks, your only job is to walk through the house with a notepad and a camera. Open every drawer. Look behind every photo frame. Check the freezer (cash, jewellery and title deeds end up in freezers more often than you’d think). Look inside books — old share certificates, war medals and family letters live in books.

A note from us: the single biggest regret families have after a cleanout is binning something they later wished they’d kept. The second biggest regret is keeping a whole shed of stuff “just in case” and paying to store it for years. The two-week pause prevents the first. The triage system below prevents the second.

The five-bucket triage system

Once the documents and valuables are accounted for, work room by room. Every object in the house gets sorted into one of five buckets. We bring coloured stickers when we help with this, but masking tape and a marker pen does the same job.

Keep — for the executor or for distribution per the will.
Family — items specific beneficiaries have asked for, or that an obvious family member should be offered first.
Sell — anything with real resale value (more on what that means in Adelaide below).
Donate — clean, working, sellable-by-a-charity items.
Remove — everything else. This is usually 60–80% of the volume.

Start with the easiest room. Not the master bedroom, not the study — the laundry or the bathroom. You’ll get into a rhythm before you hit anything emotionally heavy. The kitchen and garage tend to be the highest-volume rooms; the wardrobes and study tend to be the slowest because every item invites a story.

Work in two-hour blocks with a real break between them. Decision fatigue is a real thing, and an exhausted executor makes worse calls about what to keep.

What sells in Adelaide (and what doesn’t)

Families consistently overestimate what’s worth selling. Tastes have changed, and a lot of the “good furniture” from the 70s, 80s and 90s now sells for less than the cost of moving it. Here’s what genuinely shifts in the Adelaide market.

Quality mid-century pieces (Parker, Chiswell, TH Brown, Danish teak) — strong buyers via dealers in Norwood and Unley, and through online auction.
Persian and good wool rugs — decent prices through Adelaide auction houses.
Real silver, gold jewellery and watches — get a written valuation before you sell anything; melt value alone can surprise you.
Tools in working order — Stanley, Sidchrome, vintage hand planes and saws sell quickly on Marketplace.
Whitegoods less than 8 years old — fridges, washing machines, dryers.
Cars and trailers — even non-running cars are worth getting a wrecker’s quote before you scrap them.

What usually doesn’t sell in Adelaide in 2026: dark brown laminate dining suites, mass-market china cabinets, electric organs, encyclopaedias, large CRT TVs, treadmills, exercise bikes that aren’t Peloton-grade, and most fabric lounges over 15 years old. If you can’t get a hand to it within a week on Marketplace at $50, it’s not worth your time — it’s a donation or a removal.

Good local sale channels:

Adelaide auction houses (Theodore Bruce, Mossgreen, Toop Auctions for whole-house lots) — handle volume and pricing for you, take a commission, usually clear lots fast.
Specialist dealers — for antiques, militaria, coins, books, or art, a dealer will often come to the house and pay cash. Get two quotes.
Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree — best for tools, whitegoods, garden gear. Price firm, pickup only, daylight hours.

Charity pickups that actually collect

This trips up a lot of families: the major charities have tightened their pickup rules considerably. They will not collect anything they can’t immediately resell, and they won’t take anything stained, broken, or older than they can move.

In Adelaide, the realistic options:

Vinnies (St Vincent de Paul) — accept clean clothing, books, kitchenware, small furniture in good condition. Booked pickups available but waiting lists can stretch to weeks during busy periods.
Salvos — similar criteria; some stores will collect, others won’t. Call your nearest store directly rather than the national line.
Treasure Boxes (for baby and children’s items) — invaluable if the estate includes a grandparent’s stash of cots, prams and kids’ clothing.
Animal Welfare League — old towels, blankets and sheets that wouldn’t sell anywhere else are gold to them.

A practical tip: photograph items before you offer them. Charities are far more likely to commit to a pickup if they can see what they’re collecting. And don’t leave anything outside a charity bin or shopfront after hours — in South Australia, dumping at a charity site is illegal and the bill comes back to the estate.

Paperwork, photos and sentimental items

This is the slow work, and it’s where families often get stuck.

For paperwork: keep tax records for seven years, the will and probate documents permanently, title deeds and share certificates permanently, and recent bank statements until the estate is finalised. Everything else — old bills, manuals for appliances no one owns anymore, decades of bank statements — can be shredded. We can take bagged paper for secure off-site shredding as part of a cleanout if the volume justifies it.

For photos and slides: don’t try to sort them on the day. Box them, label the box by room and decade if you can (“Mum’s wardrobe, 1970s photos”), and take them home. Digitising services in Adelaide will scan a banana box of prints for a few hundred dollars and email you the lot. Distribute via a shared family album afterwards.

For sentimental items that aren’t claimed: offer them widely before disposing. The grandkids in Sydney might want the pressure cooker no one in Adelaide will take. A short message to the family group chat with photos saves regret later.

Booking the cleanout: what to expect on the day

Once the family has taken what they want, the resale items are sold or collected, and the donations are picked up or dropped off, what’s left is the cleanout. This is where we typically come in.

For a standard three-bedroom Adelaide home, expect:

A two-person team and a 6–8 cubic metre truck, sometimes two truck loads.
Four to seven hours on site for an unfurnished cleanout; a full day or more if the house is still furnished and full.
All sorting, lifting and loading done by us — you don’t need to be on site once you’ve shown us through.
Separation of recyclables, metals, e-waste and green waste at our yard before tipping, so you’re not paying landfill rates on things that shouldn’t go to landfill.

You’ll get a fixed quote before we start, based on a walkthrough or a video tour if you’re interstate. Our pricing is based on volume and weight at the transfer station, not by the hour, so there’s no incentive for us to drag the job out.

If the volume is huge — for example a hoarded property, or a large home in Stirling or Mount Barker with decades of stored items — we may schedule it across two days and use a larger vehicle. For more on how we handle these full clear-outs, see our deceased estate cleanouts service page and our furniture removal options for individual heavy items.

Real estate prep: what goes before, what goes after

If the property is being sold, the agent’s advice on presentation matters. In Adelaide’s current market, a cleared and lightly staged home usually sells faster and for more than a furnished but cluttered one. Talk to the agent before you start, because:

Some items should go before listing photos. Anything broken, anything stained, all medical equipment, all personal photos and religious items, and any furniture that dates the home harshly.
Some items might stay for photos and go after. A neutral lounge suite, a dining table, a made bed in the main bedroom — these help buyers visualise the space and can be removed in the week before settlement.
The shed and garage need to be empty. Buyers always look. A full garage suggests the house has storage problems.
Green waste matters. An overgrown garden in summer reads as “neglected” in photos. We can clear green waste in the same visit as the interior — see our green waste removal page.

For estates in heritage suburbs like Norwood, Unley or Walkerville, presentation is everything — buyers in those markets expect a clean slate. For family homes in newer suburbs like Mawson Lakes, function and storage matter more than styling, and a fully cleared garage will do more for the sale than fresh paint.

Doing it from interstate

About a third of the estates we clear are being managed by an executor in Melbourne, Sydney or Perth. It is entirely doable, but it works best with a system.

A remote cleanout checklist that actually works:

Fly in for one weekend at the start. Walk every room, photograph everything, retrieve documents and valuables, and meet the agent and the cleanout crew face-to-face.
Set up a shared cloud folder for photos, lists and quotes.
Use video walkthroughs to make decisions. We can video any item you’re unsure about and message it through before we move it.
Authorise a local contact — a sibling, a family friend, or the real estate agent — to be a key holder and decision maker on small things.
Schedule everything in one window. Charity pickups, dealer visits, the cleanout, the cleaner, the locksmith, the agent’s photographer. Doing it in sequence over three weeks is much cheaper than flying back twice.

Most of the executors we work with handle the whole cleanout from interstate with a single site visit at the start and another at settlement. The middle bit — the actual work — we manage on the ground.

When to call us

There’s no right time. Some families call us in week one to help with the initial walkthrough and triage. Some call us at the end, when everything that’s going to be kept or sold has gone, and only the remove pile is left. Some call us when a sibling has stalled the process for six months and the house needs to be on the market by Christmas.

Whatever stage you’re at, we can give you a fixed quote over the phone or via a video walkthrough, work around the executor’s timeline, and handle as much or as little of the work as you want. We’ve done this enough times to know it’s not a job most people want to do twice — and we’d rather you got it right the first time than rushed and regretted it.

If you’d like to talk through a cleanout, you can reach our team on 0480 845 643 or send the details through our contact page. We’ll respond the same day, usually within a few hours.

Take the two weeks. Find the documents. Then work the buckets, room by room. You’ve got this.

Deceased Estate Cleanout in Adelaide: A Family's Step-by-Step Guide