I've been working all week (Mon-Sat) for a local estate sale company here. They have been doing estate sales for something like 30 years. They also "buy out" houses. Some people don't want to wait or take the time for a formal estate sale and want a house emptied immediately, so they'll make an offer to empty the house for them at an agreed upon price (which means the "stuff" is practically free as the time, labor and transportation to completely empty a house pretty much eats up any profit potential). Anyway, they had a large warehouse FULL of stuff that was left-over from sales through the years, or piled in after a house buy-out. They also have an antique store, so a lot of the stuff gets "cherry-picked" before going into storage. The problem is, they keep piling the stuff in, but never have the time to do anything with it, so it sits and the pile gets bigger. They have 2-3 of these warehouses full of stuff and they lost their lease on one of them this month. EVERYTHING has to be out of there by next Sunday (EOM). They have an estate sale to run this week, so yesterday was D-Day ... EVERYTHING had to go. Needless to say, I did a LOT of "picking" during the week and dug out some pretty cool "junque".Originally Posted by BarryBobPosthole
I brought home a couple truckloads of stuff all week that I "bought" for pennies on the dollar (traded for my labor helping with the sale). Plus I still picked up $500-$600 in cash for my effort. Such a deal, huh?
As I said, they'd pretty much cherry-picked the stuff before putting it in storage, but what I like and what they like, aren't necessarily always the same. I had them deduct $75 from my pay, in trade for crap that I should be able to sell for 2-3K. I'm just starting to dig through some of the stuff today. No pocket knives, but I did load up on edged tools ... antique chef's knives, axes and hatchets for example. In fact, I just finished listing a 1950-1955 Boy Scout hatchet with the original handle. It's in nice shape.
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