There is a sorting model families arrive at on their own, usually around day three, and it goes: donate, yard sale, estate sale, keep, trash. Five piles, applied object by object, across an entire house.
It is an honest instinct and it is also why people lose months. Nobody can make two thousand individual decisions and stay standing. Here is a smaller version that works.
First: secure it, and find the will
From the moment you are named, the house is your responsibility — locks, utilities, insurance, mail — and it stays that way until the property transfers. Do that first, before anything else, because everything else can wait a week and this cannot.
Then find the will and call the estate attorney. Kirkwood estates go through the St. Louis County Probate Court in Clayton, and the estate generally has to be opened before contents are sold. The inventory you eventually file is much easier to defend when the valuation happened before anything left the house.
One thing worth knowing while you are on that call, because most people are never told it: whether the court calls you executor, personal representative, or estate administrator, the role carries a right to a fee and to reimbursement of your expenses out of the estate. Families routinely absorb costs personally that they did not have to. Ask before you pay for anything out of pocket.
Second: get it valued, in writing, before you touch anything
This is the step that determines whether the rest goes well.
A walkthrough and a written valuation cost nothing and commit you to nothing. What they buy you is the ability to stop guessing. Right now every object in that house is in the same category — unknown — and the five-pile model is you trying to resolve two thousand unknowns with no information.
It also gives your attorney a valuation document for the inventory filing, whether or not you ever run a sale.
What not to do in the meantime
Do not clean. Do not box things up. Do not make a donation run because a room reads as clutter. Do not accept a same-week cash offer for the contents before anyone has told you what they are worth.
The specific regret that comes up again and again is the blind donation run — a carload taken to a thrift store in week one that included something nobody had looked at. It cannot be undone, and it cannot be put back into an inventory filing.
Things people in Kirkwood houses throw out that should have been looked at: costume jewelry, old hand tools, sewing and quilting supplies, craft and hobby stock, anything in a box in the basement, sports and militaria, and paperwork of any kind. Especially paperwork.
Third: the only sorting that is yours
Walk the house with whoever else has a claim on it and take out what the family is keeping. That is it. That is the whole job.
Do it in one visit, together, if you possibly can. This step is the one nobody else can do for you and it is the one that most often sits untouched for a month while everyone waits for a better weekend. It is also where sibling disputes live, and they get harder, not easier, with time and distance.
Everything left standing after that pass is a decision someone else can make.
What happens to the rest
If the contents are worth selling, they get staged, priced and sold on site over a weekend, and whatever does not sell is cleared afterward — donated with receipts where a charity will take it, hauled otherwise — until the house is broom-clean and ready to photograph. The commission is 35% of gross sales with $0 out of pocket, and the itemized accounting is reconciled within 14 days.
If the contents are not worth selling, the right answer is a cleanout instead, and anyone honest will tell you that at the walkthrough rather than running a sale that cannot cover itself.
A house near Historic Downtown Kirkwood that has held one family since the 1960s is usually the first case. But that is a thing to find out, not to assume in either direction.
The part nobody prepares you for
The reason this takes months is not logistics. It is that every object is a decision with your mother attached to it, and there is no version of this where that stops being true.
What can change is how many of those decisions you are personally required to make. It should be one pile — what the family keeps — not five. The rest is a job, and it is a job someone else can do.