Most houses do not hide a fortune. Some houses hide a watch, a brooch, a bundle of cash or a painting that has been treated as decoration. The method has to assume those things exist, because the cost of being wrong is permanent.
The wrong method
Fill a skip from the nearest room outward. Do not open tins. Do not look in coat pockets. Treat jewellery as costume and furniture as waste. That is fast. It is also how estates lose money and families lose objects they would have kept.
The better method
Work room by room. Open the places small things live. Set aside documents. Pause on anything that looks as though it needs a second opinion. Then continue. This is slower by minutes, not days, and it is the link between clearance, valuations and reuse.
What “set aside” means
The item is not loaded as mixed waste. It is shown to the person who instructed the job, or photographed and described if they are not there. They decide: keep, sell, value properly, or include in the clearance after all.
We do not quietly take ownership of a surprise find. The contents belong to the owner or the estate until a different agreement is made.
If you already know something is valuable
Do not leave it in the house for the clearance day unless you have said so in writing. Remove it, or mark it and tell everyone involved. A verbal “there might be some jewellery upstairs” is better than nothing and worse than a labelled drawer.
After the job
If something is found later in a box that was meant to be waste, it should still be reported. That is easier when the load was sorted rather than compacted. Sorting is not only an environmental habit. It is how objects remain identifiable.
Nobody can promise that every clearance contains valuables. We can promise not to treat the house as if that question has already been answered.