The year was 1982. The little house on the corner looked like so many more across America…stuff stacked up to the tops of the windows, boxes stacked on the front porch, sheds in the yard overflowing, and cats everywhere.
I walked past the house every day on my way to work and one day noticed the firetruck and ambulance parked outside. The next day they were there again (which seemed unusual to me). I stopped and talked to one of the medics. The man who lived in the house had quit answering the door and the neighbors were concerned, so they had called the police. Two days later, the authorities were still attempting to search the house for the occupant. Since there were only tunnels from room to room, the search was very slow.
On the third day, the body of the occupant was discovered in a back room where one of the tunnels had collapsed. By this time the cats were hungry and nearly 50 of them were coaxed out and taken to the animal shelter.
The house sat vacant for a while, but then one day I noticed a couple of guys in protective gear throwing things into a truck. They would walk into the house, pick up a box and throw it in the truck. I stopped and asked them if they were saving anything, and they said, “Nope, it all goes to the landfill.”
I was not yet a licensed estate liquidator, but as someone who was raised to never throw anything away, I couldn’t stand to see a lifetime’s accumulation go to the dump. A little sleuthing
uncovered that the workers were hired by the estate attorney
(one of them was her boyfriend), and they were getting paid $50 an hour (that was a lot of money back then) to throw everything in the dump.
Although the attorney would not give me any information, one of the neighbors knew how to contact the relatives, so I called and offered to empty the house in exchange for what I could salvage. Although it would have cost them several thousand dollars for the current workers wages, they immediately became greedy and said I could have the rights to salvage the remaining contents if I completely emptied the house, grounds and outbuildings AND paid them $1,000.
I reluctantly agreed (I was young, stupid, and enthusiastic). It was almost a good purchase. The wife, who had passed away a few years before had worked at a local bank, and had brought home all of the unusual or silver coins that she came across. When I took possession of the contents, there was a roll of silver dollars in the trash can that was ready to go to the dump…all of the rest had already been thrown away.
The first thing I did was fumigate the house, since it was crawling with fleas, but I still had to wear full body protection, since everything was cemented together with cat feces. To give an idea of the magnitude of the job, I worked on the living room for five days before I discovered that there was a piano. I sold the piano to the neighbor across the street for $5. She worked on cleaning it for the whole summer, and eventually had to pay to have it hauled to the dump (she couldn’t get the smell out of it).
What had started out as a treasure hunt soon became long days of hauling loads of cat feces and anything porous (wood, cloth, paper, etc.) to the dump. The glass and metal items were salvageable and even though they were not a large portion of the volume, they kept it interesting.
The basement was full to the floor joists of the main floor, and buried in the mass was a chest freezer that had been full of meat when it had quit working some years previous. Only one time did I make the mistake of lifting the lid, and then had to quit working for two days while the house aired out (despite the fact that I was wearing a respirator at all times). I eventually duct-taped the seams around the lid and my brother-in-law and I carried it out of the basement full (you can imagine how much it weighed).
Postscript: At least twice a year people tell me what a "glamorous and interesting" profession I have chosen…if they only knew!!!