I stopped by the fruit stand the other day and the girl that was running the stand saw the “Estate Sales and Household Liquidations” sign on the side of my truck. She asked me what that meant and when I started explaining it to her, you could see the color drain out of her face.When I was done she told me her story:
Two years previously her grandparents had passed away in Portland Oregon and left her an old three story house where they had lived for 60 years, completely full of “stuff”. She lives about a hundred miles from Portland and works full time at various jobs (“just to make ends meet”), every weekend she would drive to Portland and fill up a dumpster. She said “I knew a lot of that antique stuff might be worth some money, but I don’t have any way to haul it to an antique store and I needed to spend my time getting rid of things while I was there.” After two years she had finally “managed to throw away everything so the house could be sold”. When I explained that she could have kept what she wanted and had the house empty, clean, and on the market in a short period of time (and received money from the proceeds of the sale), she was visibly shaken.
Postscript: There are dozens of estate sale companies in Portland and a good market for antique items. It is sad that someone so obviously in need of money would pay taxes, insurance, utilities on a house for two years, and spend hundreds of hours and drive thousands of miles to do hard work, all to throw away money (and equally sad that her grandparent’s lifetime accumulation of personal property all went to the dump).