The estate sale picture projectOur Bay Area and beyond hobby, visiting estate sales. An American thing (I don't think I ever heard of one in the UK): when a person dies and leaves their house unlived in, and if their family don't want the trouble of sorting through their decades of accumulation (or if there are no close family who care; or if it's all too much and anyway the valuable part is this Bay Area real estate, purchased for $35K in 1979 that's now worth $1.1M, or $2M after new white goods, off-white interior paint, luxury countertops, and gray exterior paint have been done, and the more egregious cracks in walls and basement patched), well, there are a number of local mom-and-pops who will go through it all, price the valuable parts, arrange it (perhaps sweetening the sale with more items from their lockup or store), then open it up for one or two weekends, 10am to 2pm, and take 1/3 of whatever they can sell. (Check out e.g. https://estatesales.org for estate sales local to you!) Some are happy, portraits of lives well lived. (An apartment overlooking Delores Park, husband and wife anthropologists. We bought their chaise longue.) In others, you can see the decade where it became too much to keep things well; when clothes were no longer bought; when whatever was there would make do. Patterns emerge: you can make a good guess whether the husband died first (only female clothes and shoes; tools remain in the garage, vastly arranged), or the wife (he won't dispose of her clothes; never again will the house be really clean). Whether they had children and when they were born (80s Disney on VHS; 90s Disney on DVDs). It's rare to find fine watches or cameras or other things easily claimed by the family -- good china is the exception here. There is so much china in estate sales. My rule of thumb: a good estate sale is one in which there are good books, and no one ever has just a few good books. Either it's hundreds or nothing. I've never bought clothes there, which are very common. Who does buy clothes at estate sales? Students. They can't get enough of 70s and 80s fashion. I've written enough. It is my partner who plans to write the book on estate sales. This is my ongoing picture project. |
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