When Should You Start Clearing Out The House?
7 minute read ⌚
When you are trying to make the move from the UK to Australia, timelines are a constant thought.
How long will it take to get invited to apply to a state?
How long will it take to process my visa application?
How long will it take to sell the house?
How long will it take to find a place to live?
There are more, I’m sure you have some timescale-based questions of your own.
One worth considering, though, is around the subject of when to start the house-clearing process.
You’ll Have More Junk Than You Think
We’ve spoken about the cleansing process before – When we go to Australia, I Don’t Need Stuff! on a philosophical level, I clearly still stand by this.
However, from a practical point of view, I’m not sure I’ve spoken about our experience.
Firstly, I’ll offer this assertion: you will have way more junk than you think, some stuff you won’t even remember.
We had a couple of child car seats in the loft, which I forgot we ever owned and a Christmas tree that hasn’t seen the light of day since Rage Against the Machine topped the festive charts with ‘Killing in the Name’.
Start As Early As Possible
There you go, that is the number one tip for this post. Start sorting out all of your belongings into 3 categories –
- Keep
- Sell
- Scrap
If you’re selling your house and get ahead of the curve, you can present it as a nice, airy, minimalist dream.
The estate agent will love you for the space created in the house photos that will eventually be viewed by your prospective buyers on Rightmove.
I’m sorry, but your prized Jeff Goldblum shower curtain* is gonna have to go. No matter how cool you think it is.
*This is not ours for clarification.
Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast
The phrase “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast” was introduced to me by Jason Fox in his book Embrace the Chaos, which I read on a recent family holiday to Cornwall.
Put simply, it just means that you should do things methodically and with purpose. And if that means taking a little more time to execute, so be it.
However, if you approach things one room at a time, and go through the same process (keep, sell, scrap) with each room.
Eventually, you’ll end up in a happy place where you have successfully reviewed all of your belongings and hopefully shrunk that collection of things down to a manageable size for you.
We’re intending on taking very little, so we’ve been making regular trips to Coventry tip for weeks and weeks now.
Perhaps not every week, but whenever there has been a need to review someone’s wardrobe, or tackle the garden or loft, etc.
So slow is smooth, and smooth is fast is the way to tackle the house. This approach is also going to allow you to list some of your unwanted items on Vinted/eBay/Facebook Marketplace with plenty of time to do all of the posting/collection arrangements. So you can put some money away into savings pots to go towards flights, shipping and everything else that is going to come along with moving from the UK to Australia.
Start Early and Avoid Last Minute Panics
Thinking back, we probably started our house clearing around December 2024. At the time of writing, July 2025, we are a few weeks away from completing our house sale, and we are pretty much ready to go.
We aren’t taking sofas and large items like the dining table with us, so this kind of stuff will be the last to go.
Starting early on getting rubbish out of your house will leave you with more time and mental capacity to deal with the preparations for moving away, saying goodbye properly and is just generally going to be a lot less stressful than leaving it all until the last few weeks.
Obviously, everyone has slightly differing circumstances, but please, start clearing early because your future self will thank you for it!
