On Friday mornings, I look up the local estate sales on a website, scratch down some addresses for my GPS, and put on some grubby clothes. Estate sales are dirty business.
I go to these estate sales to search for old books. It’s a little weekend hobby. I like vintage hardcovers with nostalgia value or in pretty colors for home decorators. It’s a nice nitch, because there’s little competition with other estate sale buyers. There are really three types of people who go to these sales — people who really need stuff, people who want to resell stuff on eBay, and people who are compulsive collectors. The “really need stuff” people take the boxes of salt and cereal from the kitchen. The resellers and the collectors tend to specialize in tools or costume jewelry or fine silver. The pros bring their own flashlights and venture down to scary basements. Nobody looks at the books, which is fine by me. I got a mid-1800’s Dickens book last week.
Last week, I went into an old Victorian home on a street with other Victorians that had been divided up for rentals. Multiple mailboxes up and down the block.
The house was in bad shape. The front porch had missing boards. The ceiling was buckled around the cheap brass lamp in the entrance way. Tiles had popped out of the bathroom. There was a disturbing sag to the steps on the staircase. Because I watch too many HGTV shows, I tried to estimate much it would cost to fix up this house for resale or rental. Maybe $100,000. It needed a new roof, new kitchen, new bathroom, new floors, new plumbing. Walls needed to be taken down. I looked up the cost on Zillow. They were trying to sell the house for $325K for months. They really needed to lower that price by a lot.
When you go to these estate sales, you can get absorbed in the hunt for treasure. You can calculate the resale potential. And I do that. But I’m not enough of a pro to really distract myself from the fact that someone lived in this house for decades. And someone died in this house. Their story is in those boxes. There are photographs of children from the 1970s still on their living room walls. Why didn’t anybody take that picture? Where are those children now? These people’s proudest moments — a WWII photograph, a commendation from a mayor, a baseball trophy — are being carelessly handled by distracted strangers looking for treasure.
These things tell the story of these people during their prime years. But they also tell the story of the people in their final years. The estate sale people put the old medical equipment into the bathrooms to be later tossed into a dumpster, along with all the unpurchased baseball trophies and framed 70s family photographs. Bed pans, walkers, and rubber gloves are piled in the tub.
And then there’s the dirt. It’s everywhere. The moldy air wafting from the basement. That old Victorian last week had nothing of value. I don’t think I actually touched anything in the house. But the air quality was so bad that I had to gulp down water after I left. Sometimes, I need to shower after I go on these visits, because the moldy, dusty smell sticks to my hair.
Somebody lived in that dirt, in that house with rotting porch, with the moldy smell of the basement. Nobody helped her sweep out the living room or clean out her recyclables. I felt sick after my ten minute stay in that house. How did someone live in that dirt for so long? Who’s fault is it?
I guess the woman could have sold the house ten years earlier, before she got really sick. She might have gotten $300K for the house and found a nice, clean apartment in a senior home. Maybe she was too attached to her stuff and her neighbors and her church to move. Or maybe she didn’t have help. Or maybe there aren’t enough nice, clean apartments in senior homes. I’m not sure.
We’ve got to figure out a way to care for old people in this country. If they want to die in their homes, then we have to help them live in tolerable conditions.
Apt. 11d 
I wonder how many of the old people who live crumbling houses weren’t middle-aged people who live in crumbling houses. Anyway, I’ve identified one neighbor as “most likely to die of smoke inhalation because the firemen can’t make it through the pile of stuff she keeps.” She’s probably less than ten years older than me, but she smokes, has a garage she can’t put a car in, and has piles of boxes visible through every window in the place.
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OMG, please do something to keep or preserve those old family photos/records. I’d kill for old family photos from my family, most of which were probably chucked in the aftermath of estate sales. š¦ In fact, I should send you a list of names to look out for as I had a bunch of family in northern NJ.
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Like buy the photos and put them in the basement until they moulder?
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Yes, I too wonder what you would do with the photos (other than storing them in your own basement, as MH suggests?). How would you know their were your family?
I am trying to learn to let the data go; it’s not enough to save it; we also have to invest time in preserving and documenting and curating, a huge burden.
My father still talks about some old family “papers” (I believe they were actually written on something other than paper — internet searches suggest inscribed palm leafs — I should ask) which were discarded from his family home in the last 50 years or so. They would have been amazing to have. But, it would have been deeply burdensome for the family to save them.
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Scan photos and documents. But yes, you and MH are right. You just have to understand how much it pains me to know stuff is being thrown out that would have given so much insight to future generations. The Genealogist’s Lament….
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My sister and I are sorting out my mom’s house. There were a lot of papers from a 30-year teaching career combined with worries about the theft of students’ identities from numbers on the paperwork and a preference for doing things other than clearing out old paperwork. All very understandable. I took the paperwork to a bulk recycler and got about three bucks for two carloads.
The pictures are coming to our respective places; the old trophies are, I think, getting ditched. We’re neither of us sentimental about those particular things, though of course we are sentimental about other material items.
We live far away from where we grew up, and when we came to visit, she was very insistent that we not spend the limited time clearing out her space. A couple of years back, she and her sister did get rid of a lot of papers, and organized a good bit of the rest. But stuff accumulates, and people lose interest in maintaining it, or they lose the ability to do so.
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I despair of the portion of the population who is too attached to their stuff to move. I think it’s probably at its worst now, since people over 80 lived through the depression.
My mom is one. It took ten years, four kids insisting, and my dad’s terminal illness to get her to move 1/2 mile away to a large apartment in a lovely retirement community. The stuff we cleared out of her house blew my mind. If she hadn’t moved, you’d be going through her things in a few years, coughing because the smell of rotting food has permeated the plaster in the house. .
At least in the states where I live and my parents live, there are plenty of nice clean apartments, including low-income. That’s not the problem.
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At least in the states where I live and my parents live, there are plenty of nice clean apartments, including low-income. Thatās not the problem.
Near by office, there are a couple of streets that have coop apartments that are reasonably priced and big (over 1,000 square feet). If I stay healthy, my plan is to retire to one of these. Everything is right near: bars, church, restaurants, museum, libraries, and hospitals,
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Live moderately fast, die in late middle age, leave a corpse in a beautiful house.
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