I shared how we came to buy a hoarder house, and the startling reality of owning the junk that comes in a hoarder house. Well now I’m sharing what you all have been wondering… What did you find? Let me tell you, we found a lot of cool stuff!
Sorting through this lady’s junk was sort of surreal. We knew she was an antique dealer, but seriously, who has this stuff?? For instance, there is a 6 foot Timex lighted display case that rotates. (see it in the back of this pic?)
(please message me if you want this, because we have not been able to sell it yet…)
As we sorted through, we started making piles. One bedroom for children’s toys and holiday décor, another bedroom for pottery and wicker, one bedroom for what we wanted to keep… Haha (God, please don’t let me become a hoarder!)
We sorted and organized and cleaned for a week. A full week! And even then it still felt dirty, but it was time to have a sale. Now, we realized that just unloading everything into a dumpster would have been a much faster and easier solution. But, dumpsters cost money and we had already filled a 30 yarder up with all the actual garbage in the home. And, I just feel bad filling the landfill with things that others would find useful and/or enjoy. It’s just such a waste. Plus, if we could make a few bucks in the process, it’s worth a few weekends of our lives, right?
With the house all organized for the sale, we got to pricing. I tried to sticker everything I could because: when it comes down to it, people are more likely to offer lower if there is no price on it. At least if there is $5 or something they will offer $3 instead of $1.
Jake called some antique dealers from in town and they came out the day before our sale to ‘pick’ the house. I wish we had called the American Pickers, but it was probably too short of notice. The dealers ended up buying a few hundred dollars worth of items each and also helped us out some on our pricing.
I had advertised the sale on facebook and craigslist. The first day, I got some frantic phone calls and emails wanting to know about a black chair…. I had no clue what they were referring to, but I looked in the listing and saw this photo.
Hmmmm… Why was everyone so interested in this chair? We had debated the night before about whether we should price it at $20 or $30. We seriously had no idea what items could have actual value in this house.
Well, our friend Hope got to googling and found out that the chair was a “Takeshi Nii NY”. This is a similar one on Ebay:
*Jaw-drop* We would’ve never guessed in a million years that this was an item of value. Or a 1960’s designer chair! Now, just because Ebay has it listed for that amount, it would be foolish to think we could get that much. Especially since we are looking to unload a whole houseload of items in a weekend or two and can’t afford to drag the process out for every item that might be worth more.
I haggled with some ladies over the chair via text before the sale and had settled at $175 if no one else came through and bought it for more. The morning of the sale, one lady showed up half an hour early just to get that chair before anyone else came through. Eventually we sold it to her for $200.
A part of me is like, what if we could’ve gotten WAY more for it??? But another part of me realizes that we got ten times more than we thought we would so, I’m satisfied. I had to take that photo out of our listings though, because I kept getting calls from Chicago furniture dealers and I just can’t bear to know what they would’ve paid for it…
The first weekend of sales was very successful. We made a really good chunk of change, but…. ¾ of the stuff was still there. We NEEDED to get rid of this stuff to start any kind of renovation and to have any hope of moving in before our short term lease was up.
There is not enough room in this post to show you pictures of all the items we found. I don’t even have pictures of all the items, there were just so many….. so I’ve put the garage sale pictures in a slideshow here for anyone who is curious to scroll through.
Guys, did I mention that our first week of the sale it was 95+ degrees and we had no air???? We were so pumped up on adrenaline that it didn’t matter..
The second weekend turned out to be a bit of a flop. We only made half the money compared to the first weekend, and still had WAY too many things left over. So, last minute I created an account on estatesale.net and advertised everything at 50% off on Saturday and 75% off on Sunday. That brought people out in droves. Nothing like a good fire sale to drum up your numbers.
I think we sold at least ¾ of the items. We brought the leftover loads to local thrift shops, until they literally turned us away!! And then we tossed the rest. It only turned out to be one pickup truck load of ‘non-garbage’ that we threw out, so I feel pretty good about our recycling efforts.
And just like that (3 weeks later), our house was clear(er) and could start to breath.
Telling the story of our adventure is so fun, but what I can’t wait to share is all the cool ideas we have to transform this space into a Mid-Century-Modern-Scandinavian-Chalet… How did that sound?? Still working to define the style… more on that in the next post 😉