barn sale

Some of you might remember that between last Thanksgiving and December 13, I was helping my sister care for her dying husband.

Now that she's alone she doesn't want to live so far out of town (and her place requires more maintenance than she wants) and one day she noticed that the house next to her friend and boss (large lots) in the neighborhood she wants to live in was for sale. It's a foreclosure actually and will need some work but because of that, seeing the house for sale, she decided to put her house on the market and hope it sold before that little house did.

This seemed like a good strategy since the real estate market here is not that great (and there are about 100 houses for sale in this little town of less than 10,000) and the house in town needed to have some remodeling finished that had been started when the previous owners walked away from it. The bank would surely be lowering the asking price as time went on because no one would buy it at the current price.

Against all odds, she had a family come look in the first week her house was listed and they made an offer. Lots of negotiations ensued as different roadblocks appeared but eventually all hurdles were cleared and she is closing the end of the month.

Not only was she going through this process as a seller but also as a buyer, negotiations and roadblocks on the house she wanted to buy. Both closings seem to be on track now though so packing has begun again in ernest. I've been going over several evenings a week to help pack and we've already packed a lot of stuff but my sister has a lot of stuff.

She's a collector.

of dishes and dishware in general

of antique kitchenware

of plates

of cookbooks

of dragons

of books in general

of dolls (mostly keeper of the doll collection from our youth)

of art

of clothes (6 or 7 decades worth)

of family history

of yard ornaments

of antique furniture

And these are just the things I can think of off the top of my head. She's being very good though and is getting rid of some stuff.

Which is one of the reasons for the barn sale this past weekend. The other reason was her husband's stuff. He was a collector too. He would go to garage sales and haunted Craig's List and he would buy stuff, the more of it the better apparently.

They have a barn on their property as big as my property in the city. I could pick up my lot, house and all, and put it in their barn. That never ceases to amaze me. And that barn was full of stuff.

like tools new or old (hand tools, power tools, yard tools, machines, you name it)

like nearly 500 pharmacy bottles, all identical

like 18 sections of wrought iron fencing (five of which now live at my house)

like 2 dozen or so casement windows

like a propane range for outdoor cooking

like a kerosene outdoor heater

like a motorized bike (not a moped, an actual bike with a motor) that never got assembled

like four or five boxes of old cafeteria dishware

like an oxygen machine

like several dozen solar panels (he actually sold all but about 5 or 6 of those)

like all his hurricane window samples from his last job

And these are just the things I can think of off the top of my head. There was much much more stuff than what I listed.

Well, everything didn't sell but a lot of it did and the barn is, if not empty then much more spacious. The rest of the stuff will be given to the resale shop or to the local scavenger/recycler or hauled to the dump.

At one point my sister turned to me after some high dollar item walked out.

“He's going to come back and haunt me tonight,” she said.

“Why”, I asked, “cause you're selling all his stuff?”

“No,” she said, “cause I'm selling it all for so cheap.”