Distribution of assets from will after house sale

After the sale of a house there are usually bills to be paid. There may have been undertakings to pay off LPT or the like from the sale proceeds. There may be other bills owing by the estate. These have to be dealt with before any money is paid out. There will be legal fees and there may be other claims on the estate. Estate accounts have to be prepared. If there is any money left the solicitor will get in touch with you in due course.

It's very fact-dependent. If there's a delay it could be because (contrary to what you were led to believe) there are issues to be sorted out and money has to be held in reserve to deal with them. Or it could be because the executor is lazy or distracted or otherwise impeded from doing what needs to be done to complete the wind-up of the estate. Or it could be a bit of both. We have no real way of knowing.

All you can do is ask the executor "when am I going to get my money?" The executor is ultimately accountable to the beneficiaries, so they are in a better position to ask this question than anyone else is.

For what it's worth, if there's a substantial amount of cash in the executor's hands for any period of time it should be on deposit and earning interest, which in due course will be included in the sums distributed to beneficiaries.

Generally not. If the account is in the sole name of the deceased and the deceased has died, no-one has the right to operate the account. In practice banks have a degree of pragmatic flexiblity about this, so that urgent and necessary payments can be made, but it wouldn't normally be possible to transfer a substantial balance from a current account to a deposit account.

If the substantial balance is in the deceased's deposit account, though, although no-one can operate the account until a grant of probate is obtained interest does continue to accrue and will be an asset of the estate, and reflected in the distributions to beneficiaries.

The executor doesn't use the deceased's bank account. As soon as he gets a grant of probate nominating him as executor he opens an estate account with a bank (for which he, not the deceased, is the bank's customer) and the balance on the account of the deceased is transferred to the estate account. Payments to beneficiaries come out of the estate account.

(This is what happens in a well-run, well-managed estate administration process. If the estate is small and/or simple or the executor is acting without professional support/advice sometimes, um, shortcuts are taken. As long as everybody gets what they are entitled to, and the executor can account for all the assets at the end of the process, no harm is done.)