The House Everyone Grew Up In

When the family home finally has to be dealt with, the argument that follows is almost never really about the house.

On paper it is simple. There is a property, there is a valuation, there are two or three people with an equal claim. An accountant could resolve it in an afternoon. It routinely takes two years, and the people involved usually cannot explain afterwards what went so wrong.

What went wrong is that each sibling is defending a different house.

The eldest is defending the house of the early years, when money was tight and both parents worked and they were the one who did the picking up from school. The youngest is defending a house that had already relaxed by the time they knew it, where the rules were softer and there was more of everything. Whoever stayed nearby is defending the house of the last decade — the practical one, with the boiler that failed twice and the appointments they drove to.

These are not the same building. They only share an address.

That is why the offers people make each other land so badly. Someone proposes a fair split and is genuinely baffled to be met with fury, because they costed the property and not the version. What the furious sibling heard was not a number. It was: the years you spent here do not count for more than mine, and the last four years of hospital runs are worth nothing extra.

There is a further complication, which is that the house is also the last physical proof of a specific arrangement of people. While it stands, unsold, the family that lived in it is still, in some technical sense, a going concern. Selling it converts that family into a memory with a completion date. Some people are ready for that and some are not, and the ones who are not will find reasons to delay that have nothing to do with the market.

The families that get through this well tend to do one thing early: they separate the two conversations and hold them in that order. First, what did this place mean and what should happen to the objects in it. Then, and only then, what is it worth and how is that divided. Doing money first almost guarantees the other conversation will erupt in the middle of it, disguised as a dispute about the estate agent.

Nobody needs to agree about what the house was. That is not achievable; four people lived in four houses. What is achievable is each of them getting to say it out loud once, to the others, before anybody talks about a price.