Tuesday, May 11, 2021

ESTATE SALE

 The long awaited Estate Sale finally arrived! It was out of town and closer to my daughter's home so the plan was for me to spend the night at her house the night before so we could get to the sale early. the next morning.

I have probably explained this previously but at Estate Sales, numbers are given out so people are allowed in when their number is called. They usually let 20 people go in with the first group ( numbers 1-20 ) but with Covid, the number of people allowed to go in is much smaller and varies depending on the size of the house. And, seemingly just within the last several years, someone arrives early and hands out "pre-numbers" just so that the early arrivals don't get cheated out of getting the first numbers. Most Estate Sale organizers honor the "pre numbers" so it has become rather expected. That means that if the Sale begins at 9:00, numbers will be given out at 8:00 or 7:30 and someone who is handing out the pre numbers arrives even before that!  But recently some people who give out the pre numbers decided to start parking in front of the sale the night before! Yes, they camp out in front of the house! So we decided we were going to drive over the night before and be the people to give out the pre numbers. We weren't going to stay overnight though. We were just going to leave the pre-numbers hanging on a tree or something. We had our pre numbers ready to go! ( are you following me so far? ) 

The day before the sale my son-in-law, Jon, had to go to a meeting  near where the sale was to be so he decided he could leave the pre numbers somewhere at the Estate Sale in the morning and of course we would take numbers 1 and 2 thus being the first two into the sale! He got there at 9:00 AM the day before the sale and someone had already posted the pre numbers!! Several people were already there and had taken their pre-numbers. He grabbed numbers 10 and 11! Really good numbers for this sale! Then the Estate Sale organizer said that if you take a pre-number you had to stay there until the sale and couldn't leave! WHAT?! Things were getting out of hand with this pre-numbers thing!! Jon had to go to his meeting so of course he didn't stay. Later he brought home our pre numbers 10 and 11 and we were elated until he told us that they said we were supposed to camp out overnight! Well, that wasn't going to happen so we had mixed feelings about even going!! Were they going to honor our pre-numbers? Would we be able to get in? 

We decided to risk it! The next morning we got up early and left the house in order to arrive at the sale by 7:30 to trade in our pre-numbers for the "real" numbers! There were quite a few people there but did it look like they had spent the night there?  OK some of the men DID look like they slept in their cars! LOL. One guy said he had driven all the way from Illinois for the sale and slept in his car!

This sale was packed with "advertising antiques" so there were a lot of men there who either collect these for themselves or to sell. We were among the few women there! This sale had been advertised nationally so it promised to be a good one! Even for those like us who didn't care about the advertising antiques as much.

So we waited. And then the guy came out to call out the  "pre numbers" and give out the real numbers to get in. Was he going to honor our pre-numbers even if we didn't stay all night? After all we went through, were we going to be able to get into this amazing sale?

YES!! He didn't seem  concerned at all if anyone had stayed overnight or not!! We were going to get in!! Well, we were going to get in when they opened up at 9:00, anyway. We still had another 1 1/2 hours to wait for the sale to open! We headed back to the car to drink some coffee and tea we had brought and to look at the posted photos of the sale once again!

You have to have a strategy going into these sales! We had to carefully search the photos they listed...all 532 of them...to see what we wanted to buy. We had looked previously at the photos but now we had to be intentional about how to find those specific items we were interested in. We looked closely at where the item might be in the house. Did it look like the kitchen, or is it in the basement? What big piece of furniture is it near? We don't want to be running around the whole house looking for the item we want! It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack! There were that many treasures in this house! 

Our strategy was set so we sat back and drank our thermos of coffee and tea and waited...

We filled the back of the van with treasures and we are still listing them in our shop. Check out some of them now here

*******Plummer House News*******

Back at home at the Plummer House, things are shaping up for Spring and we're finally getting to open up after Covid restrictions! Ben, the gardener, planted pansies for the Spring and will replace them with Summer Flowers later. More work needing to get done in this 49 room mansion! To see what the Plummer House is, check out my Plummer House Page by clicking on the button at the top of the page.




                                                     Pansies are one of my favorite Spring flowers...along with tulips of course! What are yours?

No comments:

Post a Comment