House in Progress Diary

Hi. I added your site to my Bloglines (a web-based RSS reader that I like better than My Yahoo). Saw your link in a message on Gaper's Block on home ownership. I spent a bunch of time just now looking through the "What on Earth" archive. Amazing. Have you had your estate sale yet?

When my mom died a couple years ago, she left me the house in Michigan where I grew up and where she'd lived for over 30 years without ever throwing anything away. I couldn't deal with it, so we tried to hire an estate sale agency to come in and do an estate sale. They looked around and said there was too much crap and not enough valuable stuff to be worth their time. So I had a big garage sale myself (with the help of a lot of friends and family). We sold most stuff for $1 and didn't take any time to research what was valuable and what wasn't. Everything we couldn't sell, we through in the dumpster. It was a huge, semi-truck sized dumpster and we filled it with all my mom's possessions. Quite an emotional weekend, to say the least.

So I can't really blame your Previous Owner for just leaving all that crap there. It's really overwhelming to have to go through all your parents' stuff and try to figure out what you want to keep, what you want to throw away, what you want to try to sell, and how much it's worth.

I imagine it's almost as hard to go through a stranger's stuff and make the same decisions. But frankly, I'm amazed that you didn't just get a dumpster and throw it ALL away. Are you really making enough money from it to make up for the months (!) of time you're putting into cataloging it all? Or is it fun too? It seems sort of fun in a pawn shop way (and they had much cooler stuff than my mom, ha ha), but dang.

Anyway, if you haven't had your estate sale yet, I look forward to checking it out. I love other people's junk. In doses. Small doses.

Jake--

I'm very sorry about your parents...I think anyone who has parents dreads that day.

To answer your question...well...the question is a tougher than it looks. Have we made any money selling the stuff? To date, we have made enough to pay for the extra month we had our belongings in storage while the owner lived here rent free after closing. And to pay for some of the cleaning (supplies and time) we've had to do, which has been a huge job. It is sad to say that the house had not been cleaned for years.

As you know all too well, the time and money it takes to sell items is also considerable. In our case we need to clean out enough of the rocks and dirt and trash to have space where the public are able to walk around in the garage for a sale. That has taken so much longer than we thought.

The previous owner here must have suffered from the obsessive-compulsive disorder related to hoarding (she was pretty young--59--and her brother and sister are even younger). This has been her house for a decade. I feel sympathy--it must be terrible to have had that. I feel surprised that her brother and sister didn't do more to intervene when the house became so dirty (clutter is okay, but the health issue was intense). I feel wonder--some of the historical things are fascinating. And I feel frustration--it's pretty clear, looking back, that we were naive.

To give her that last month in the house beyond closing was a mistake. When she told us she needed another month to clean things out and that she didn't have money for help, we felt very sad for her. We didn't know she had already been living full time in her new condo, that she had quite a bit of money and family to help. We felt set up when she left with these words: "At closing, I would have cleaned it because I was a seller. But now I am a renter and can leave the place however I want."

In the face of that, I can't let her defeat us. I just can't. We have to laugh about it or we'd cry. We have to make lemons out of lemonade. Maybe it's the Irishman in me...pass the Guinness!!!! Ah well. Anyway. We'll never tell anyone her name or besmirch her family. It isn't about that. We'll just keep digging out. And hopefully, other folks we'll get to learn from our story and avoid the same.

Take good care--

jmo

That was really just slimey of her. Not cool at all. Even if she is crazy... Your sympathy for her is extremely generous!

But you've really got an amazing story. It's like an acheological expedition. At least my mom didn't collect ROCKS, ha ha.

It certainly doesn't sound like you're letting her defeat you. It looks like you've got a great place that's really coming along. And now you've got a bunch of people all over the world really excited to see how your bathroom turns out! It's a funny world in the internet age.

Since we're doling out wisdom and hindsight, may I suggest that everyone take a little time to help their parents go through their basements, attics, and cubby holes every once in a while? It'll probably be sort of fun to hear the stories about why they're keeping some of the stuff they're keeping. And they might even realize they're storing a bunch of junk that they don't care about. Let them sort through their stuff. My mom had stuff that I KNOW she hadn't even looked at in over 20 years.

The big lesson I learned is that if you have so much stuff that you no longer even know what you have, you have too much stuff. And you should get rid of the junk so you can enjoy the cool stuff.

PS - My mom's house wasn't this bad, thank goodness.