Where to even start
You are probably standing in a living room that has not changed its furniture arrangement since the Reagan administration, looking at a closet full of coats nobody will wear again, wondering why a task this sad also has to be this physically enormous. That is the normal reaction. Springfield has a lot of homes built in the 1950s through the 1970s, modest ranch houses and split-levels with basements that were meant for storage and became, over forty or fifty years, a second house's worth of belongings. A family clearing one of these places is not dealing with clutter. They are dealing with decades.
The first useful thing to do is walk the house room by room and separate what needs a decision from what does not. Trash, broken furniture, water-damaged boxes from the basement, anything mildewed or clearly unusable does not need a family meeting. That stuff can go straight to a dumpster. Everything else, the photographs, the tools, the good furniture, deserves a slower pass. Doing that sorting first, before anything gets hauled, keeps you from later wondering if you tossed something you meant to keep.
What Ozarks weather does to a house full of belongings
Basements in this part of Missouri get damp. Limestone bedrock and clay soil mean poor drainage in a lot of older neighborhoods, and a house that has sat with reduced heating and cooling for even a year or two, which happens often when an elderly owner moves to assisted living before the family finalizes anything, will have humidity problems in the lower level. Cardboard boxes wick moisture. Photo albums, books, and fabric stored in a basement here for decades are often already compromised by the time anyone opens them, whether or not there is visible mold.
Attics are the opposite problem. Springfield summers push attic temperatures well past what most stored items can handle for years on end, and that heat cycles hard against winter cold. Plastic storage bins crack, adhesives fail, old photographs curl and fade. If the estate includes a garage, check for rodent activity before assuming boxes are intact. Mice are common in Greene County garages, especially detached ones, and they get into stored linens and paper goods first.
More on this from Roll-Off Express, Springfield.
Sorting what stays from what goes
Set aside anything with a name on it that matters: deeds, wills, insurance papers, tax records, military discharge papers. These often turn up in odd places, a coffee can in the garage, a shoebox on a closet shelf, the bottom drawer of a dresser. Older Springfield residents who lived through leaner decades often distrusted banks and filing cabinets equally, so check furniture drawers and under mattresses before you assume a piece of furniture is empty.
Furniture from this era is often solid wood and heavier than what is made today. It has resale or donation value even when it looks dated, so it is worth a separate pile rather than an automatic trip to the dumpster. Appliances, mattresses, and anything with refrigerant need to be handled outside a standard dumpster load, since most rental services have rules against those items and will charge extra or refuse pickup if they show up mixed in with general debris.
When a dumpster actually helps
Once the keep pile is set aside, the volume of what is left usually surprises people. A single-family home with a basement and an attic, both full, commonly fills more than a truckload once everything is out. Renting a dumpster and staging it in the driveway means the family is not making repeated runs to the transfer station over several weekends, which matters if relatives are only in town for a short stretch to handle the estate.
Springfield driveways and yards vary a lot by neighborhood. Older parts of town near Rountree or Delaware have narrower streets and driveways that were built for one car, not a roll-off container plus a family's vehicles. It is worth measuring the space and checking with the property before delivery, especially in neighborhoods with mature trees close to the curb, since low branches are a common problem for delivery trucks in older sections of town.
Where this stops being a homeowner job
If the house has any sign of a hoarding situation, structural damage, or an infestation, that is past the point of a family doing it themselves over a weekend. Same with anything involving asbestos, which shows up in some Springfield homes built before the 1980s in old floor tile, pipe insulation, or siding. Disturbing that material to load it into a dumpster is not something to do without knowing what it is first.
There is also an emotional stopping point that is just as real. Sorting a parent's home is exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with lifting boxes. It is fine to hire the hauling out and keep your own energy for the decisions that actually require you, the photographs, the letters, the things nobody else can sort but family.