A couple of months ago I was contacted by a family that was interested in liquidating the contents of their mother’s condo. I offered to meet with them the next day but they said it would be the following week before they were ready and they would call me. When they called the following week it was to tell me that they would need another week “to get ready” and then the same thing happened again. By the time they were “ready” it was well into November, and we had already had snow. When I met with them I could hardly believe my eyes! Their idea of “getting ready” the last three weeks had meant “staging” the condo.
In the bedrooms, the dresser drawers had been emptied and the clothes neatly laid out on the bed, hats hung on the corners of the chairs, dolls propped up against the pillows. In the bathroom, half tubes and bottles of hair and skin products had been neatly arranged on the counters, fresh towels hung by the tub and the end of the roll of toilet paper had been folded into a triangle like you see in motel rooms. In the dining room the table was set with a full place setting of dishes and flatware at each place and there were even silk flowers for a centerpiece. In the kitchen the cans of food in the cupboards had been arranged into little pyramids (with all the labels turned the right way) and all the kitchen utensils had been taken out of the drawers and laid out on the counter tops, the cookbooks were even in alphabetical order! The garage was the same story with partial cans of automotive chemicals neatly arranged in little pyramids on the shelves.
Unfortunately, while they were spending their time staging they had failed to check if the HOA would allow an on-site estate sale and it turned out not to be permissible. All the clothes that they had so neatly arranged had to be stuffed in bags and taken to charity. The half tubes and bottles of hair and skin products as well as the little pyramids of past dated cans of food went to my friend that raises hogs, and the partial cans of automotive chemicals were deposited at hazardous waste. There was nothing worth boxing, loading, hauling, paying storage and storing until spring, finding a place to sell and then loading, hauling, unloading, unboxing and selling. The three weeks they had spent staging the condo had all been wasted.