Featured House clearance

Indeed!

 

Wow, all those watch casings and parts! Talk about a steampunk dream come true...

I was wondering if you had any advice to someone as how to get started in such a business. I have heard of people that do this before but just not sure how you find out about these places. Any hints and helpful tips would be appreciated. I am in the states, so I do not believe I would cause you any competition. Thanks!

 

This just dropped on me out of the blue due to a connection at the estate agents. (see posts passim.) Mostly people just advertise, and shmooze estate agents.

I do not know the law in USA but some kind of waste transport/tipping license may be needed, and few places would be such a mixture of literal trash and treasure.

Most houses that reach the total clearance stage will have had relatives picking over them, if they had anything worthwhile in the first place, and many if not most homes just have routine newish and recent or simply outdated contents.

Everyone hopes for a Comstock Lode strike, but most of the time is is simply a matter of hauling away and legally disposing of stuff no-one wants. You do get paid to do this, but it's a competitive field with lots of overhead costs.

 

congrats in securing an interesting assignment! eew though, be safe in the clean-up. weird stuff can get into your lungs.

 

I had met people along the years here who cleared out places to be torn down or after renters move out. But none were looking for antiques, and would probably have just thrown out many if the value was not obvious. Also they have these tv shows now where they clear out the houses of hoarders with their agreement I suppose. I have not actually watched one of these shows as I find it a bit disgusting. Not the people or their houses, but the tv execs that would embarrass them in front of millions for the ratings and almighty dollar. I had thought in the past of forming some sort of business to help these people regain control of their homes without having to do it for the whole world to see. Just a "pipe dream" as I know nothing about the legalities of such or how to setup or operate a business.

It reminds me a bit of childhood living in tornado alley. There were many abandoned vehicles and houses that were half destroyed years before scattered about town. I used to rummage around through the debris just looking for anything of interest and pretending that anything sparkly or shiny was treasure. I don't remember taking anything from them or finding anything valuable. Then again, I was not even two digits so I wouldn't have known even if I had seen something of monetary value. Ahh, such sweet childhood memories.

 

Thanks AF for the information. I had no idea there was so much involved. Should've known there are so many regulations for everything nowadays, sometimes I am so naïve.

 

I am off tomorrow to start the job, with a bit more searching and also packing safely of some stuff already identified, some of which I have shown earlier. Wednesday is the main moving day, with all the watches and clocks and I hope remaining antiques identified and packed. That day will include some rubbish sacking and removal just to make room to see what is underneath.

I also hope to have time to take a proper look at the books and the prints which I have only glanced at so far. That day will see most of our packed boxes heading south with my colleague who is hiring a van. At the end of the day, a local antique dealer and house clearer will come to price up removing the rest that I do not want, the furniture and everything else.

Thursday and Friday have been assigned for this to happen, I hope that at the end of the day I can hand the place over to the estate agents ready for viewing.

We have booked a local hotel for our stay up North to avoid a 2 hour each way commute. I will take the laptop so I should be able to post some more pictures as I go along.

I must confess to being childishly excited for a man of my age, as I feel that although we have found more than enough stuff to make this a lucrative operation, there is always the lure of possible further treasure to perk things up a bit. I know there are places I have not really looked at properly yet, the first look was like a gold strike where you just wander round picking up the visible nuggets, the rest will need some digging and panning.

 

Maybe you could wear a GoPro and we could all enjoy the hunt There was a tv show on the other day called Garage Gold where they clear out garages for free but get to keep what they find. It looks very salted like Storage Wars to me, hard to imagine people would just give away their guns, antiques etc. without retrieving before the clearout (for free).

 

You might want to take a metal detector, never know....in such an old place.

 

Sorr about the lack of updates, I have been totally knackered by evening and we have not taken many pictures either. Couple that with wi-fi problems, well, phew.

Some nice finds though. We keep thinking we have finished Then another 17 C book or odd object surfaces. More when my head starts working normally again

 

Take care, but I super curious about the haul.

 

On pins and needles to see what you have found. Take care of yourself and what you need to do. I probably speak for all of us when I say, "I can wait. It just builds the excitement." Good luck and try to squeeze in some rest as well.

 

A brief progress report but no pictures as yet.

I am home for Saturday night, partly because the hotel did not have a room for us tonight, partly because because the car was stuffed full and partly to water my tomato plant and sit on the lawn in the sun.

The first day went to plan, or rather better, because the agents had unearthed the old man's keys, including the car key. This was going to make getting rid of the car a lot easier. The first afternoon we spend packing some, or indeed most of the objects most easily reachable and identified, including two Victorian silver teapots, some carved coconut objects, various smalls, including snuffboxes, and so on.

The next day was busy as I had my colleague and friend arrive with a big van to remove all the clocks and watches and watch movements and parts, that were to be his share of the good material. The student siblings of a relative of a friend arrived to assist us, and they worked like beavers clearing away rubbish and moving heavy stuff to explores under and around it. The amount we got done would have been impossible without them. Every now and again they would bring me things for a go/no go verdict, and I am sure they were sensible enough not to have dumped anything that there was the least doubt about.

By the end of the day, we had filled 5 largish storage boxes with interesting items, and these were packed off back to the midlands with my friend and his clocks and watches, leaving us with an empty car for the next day.

During the day the scrap men came round for the car. I find it difficult to believe that a car that had been untouched for about a year, supplied with power from a battery pack, started instantly, as if it had been run yesterday, and without smoke, clattering or any drama. This was a 15 or 16 year old Honda. It was driven out of the garage and onto the scrap man's truck and considering this game performance I felt it deserved better.

The general clearance man arrived to quote for shifting the masses of stuff that was left, but this is where the plans began to unravel, as my over optimistic estimate of being finished by Friday evening were just impossible, he could not even make a bit of a start till Friday.

WE were faced with the middle of next week (this coming week) as a date for finishing the work, so another 300 quid hotel bill was imminent. I agreed to pay him £600 and all the usable stuff we had left to do the job of disposing of everything.

We had asked the students to do another days work on Thursday, so they did a bit more rubbish bagging, then started digging. I was feeling pretty exhausted so I just sat down and examined the finds. These were finds that I would have been just too tired to find and included a box of mainly 17th C books, earliest from 1613, buried under other stuff, and remarkably, in the back of a bookcase behind books they were checking, a tin containing about 10 Victorian boxes of percussion caps, all full, I think and mostly unopened original packaging.
Suffice to say that this extra day's picking produced another 5 storage boxes of small and mid size stuff including good books, and some larger items. filling the car again. So much so that we had to palm them off with my paradaughter and her partner to store for a few days.

Friday morning we were back at the house to wait the first visit from the total clearance man. While waiting I had another look at some piles of books and found a 1615 'Breeches' or Geneva bible I had not noticed, and 3 Charles Dickens first editions.

We got away at about midday Friday and after a few hours at the hotel resting and researching some of the books I had found, we thought maybe just one last look, so went back to the house. I found a copy of the Life of General Monk, about 1620, and some other odds and ends and some collecting books I meant to keep. The last event was checking a row of unpromising looking books on a shelf in a cupboard so high I had to fetch the ladder to get to it. These were so inaccessible that no one had actually looked at them. I removed a few and there was something behind them on the 2 foot deep shelf. One by one I removed 11 really nice American shelf clocks of beehive and sharp Gothic form, all in excellent condition, with a couple of quite early ones, all with original painted glass front panels, keys and pendula. The best examples of this type of clock I had seen and found as an afterthought
By the time these had been stowed in the car, it had reached today's level of stuffedness, far too full to consider adding the other boxes I had stored locally, so we decided at that point to come home after supervising the general clearance man making a start with the bigger and keepable furniture this morning.

Tomorrow we are back up North to the paradaughter's place for a meal and loading the boxes she is keeping, so when we finally return all the goodies will be here with us. More or less, I will still have to collect the boxes my friend brought back but that's fairly local.
Back to the hotel for Sunday to Tuesday nights, Wednesday is scheduled to be the last day of clearance, all being well, and the first part of the job is (DV) finished.

Examining and researching the loot will take a while after that, and at that point I will add some pictures of some of the stuff. I estimate the way this gift horse of a house just kept on giving, we probably have about three times the value of the goods I expected when I took on the job.

More to follow.

 

And the nice thing too is that most of the stuff won't go to landfill. I have a running groan with my lovely local auctioneer about Stuff in Skips. He - and I - would rather see the travellers pick them over and grab the dacent bits, rather than them be destroyed forever. Not surprised on the Honda, and I'll bet it doesn't get scrapped, either. Had it been SORNd?

And what's a paradaughter.

 

A project always expands to fill more time than you imagined.

Can't wait to see the goodies! You'll be identifying stuff all winter!

 

I was wondering about the meaning of "paradaughter," too.

And thanks for all of the detail in your story, AF. Very interesting!

 

Paradaughter - in my experience it is the child of a partner with no legal bond. May be different elsewhere in the world.

 

That has been my assumption since he first mentioned her.