Quote:
Originally Posted by Danimal16
Curt,
Can you share the resources you used to sell the stuff and also to donate? What lessons did you learn, i.e. advice to others?
Dan
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Of course, the house, the business, and the cars are a different animal and were sold via the usual means. Selling the rest involved many garage/moving sales and CL adverts - nothing magic, just lots of work/time. Luckily, we had my large shop to store everything and stage these sales. At one Fri-Sat only sale, we did quite well and the leftovers were going to be donated to thrift stores (but that in itself can be a lot of work). So we advertised for Sunday noon-to-2 everything is FREE. People would walk into the shop and ask where the free stuff was. "Ummm, everything in here is free. Take what you want" Saved us from boxing up and transporting lots of stuff. And many thrift stores today are very, very picky about what they will take.
A lot of smaller,more valuable stuff was sold on ebay. Some was given away to relatives (that turned out to be surprising difficult. i.e., hey I've got a nearly new Weber stainless steel gas grill you can have for free. I'll even deliver it! Reply from 5 different relatives: I don't really need one.") It can be very difficult to give good stuff away for free!
To be clear, we weren't hoarders by any stretch of the imagination. The 'stuff' was typical of almost any large household of 30 years or so.
If I were to do it again, I'd hire an estate sale company and just get rid of everything at once. Wouldn't get nearly the money, but less headaches by far. Although the can of gas and a lighter method was considered more than once ...