I recently received a call from a family that wanted me to hold an estate sale for them. Since that is what we do, I made an appointment to meet with them. Here is what I found:
The son and daughter that I met with were both in their late 60s, and their parents had been in their 90s when they passed away after over 60 years in the same house. When the second parent passed away, the son and daughter had come to town and spent over a week boxing up EVERYTHING in the house and moving it into a two car garage they had rented on the other side of town.
The material from the house had now been in the garage for over two years and they had finally decided that they needed to do something with it. The entire garage was stacked eight feet deep in boxes, and when I asked them what the plan was, they said “We want you to have a sale”. When I asked them if they had kept everything that they wanted, the said “No, we will just keep what we want out of the sale”.
I explained some of the many reasons why that would not work, and said that we needed to sort out the items in the garage. I explained that there there would be several different piles: The items they wanted to keep, garbage, recycling, charity, and salable. They informed me that this was “personal stuff” and that they did not want anyone else using it, so they did not want anything to go to charity. After a considerable while, I convinced them that while some items are “personal” things like snow tires and toasters are better given to charity than put in the landfill.
Following a resolution to that discussion, we began the lengthy process of trying to sort out the massive amount of boxed material in the garage. That was when we found out that the cement slab was below grade and that the roof had leaked for two winters. All of the personal papers and photos were ruined, the valuable antique tin toys were completely rusted, the wooden furniture (buried under hundreds of pounds of moldy books) was warped, etc. When we were done sorting, it was 95% garbage, 4% charity, and 1% personal items.
Postscript: If they had initially sorted out what they wanted at the house and had an estate sale there for the remaining items, they would have had everything they wanted to keep, and money for the rest of it. Instead, after much more work and paying two years rent, they had virtually nothing.