WHAT NOT TO DO, AND WHAT TO DO, WHEN REMOVING THE CONTENTS OF THE FAMILY HOMESTEAD

I have heard lots of stories over the years about how families have handled removing the contents of the family homestead when the time came to sell it.  A blogger I read occasionally just put up a short post about how his family handled it.  I think the experience he reports is fairly typical.  The method he describes involves getting rid of stuff in stages as you are emotionally able to do so, That isn’t necessarily a bad technique except that it inevitably results in punting the issue to your children to some extent, as he admits. 
My long-standing advice in dealing with the house contents (the term people in my line of work seem to like to use is “personal effects,” but I prefer “house contents” or simply “stuff”) is this: if another family member says, “I want that,” the correct answer is “OK.”