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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;afantiques, post: 68847, member: 25&quot;]A brief progress report but no pictures as yet.</p><p><br /></p><p>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&nbsp; and partly to water my tomato plant and sit on the lawn in the sun.</p><p><br /></p><p>The first day went to plan, or rather better, because the agents had unearthed the old man&#039;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. </p><p><br /></p><p>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&nbsp; 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.</p><p><br /></p><p>By the end of the day, we had filled 5 largish storage boxes with interesting items, and these were packed off back&nbsp; to the midlands with my friend and his clocks and watches,&nbsp; leaving us with an empty car for the next day.</p><p><br /></p><p>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&#039;s truck and considering this game performance I felt it deserved better.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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. </p><p>Suffice to say that this extra day&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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 &#039;Breeches&#039; or Geneva bible I had not noticed, and 3 Charles Dickens first editions. </p><p><br /></p><p>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&nbsp; 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</p><p>By the time these had been stowed in the car, it had reached today&#039;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.</p><p><br /></p><p>Tomorrow we are back up North to the paradaughter&#039;s place for a meal and loading the boxes she is keeping, so when we finally return all the goodies will&nbsp; be here with us. More or less, I will still&nbsp; have to collect the boxes my friend brought back but that&#039;s fairly local.</p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p>More to&nbsp; follow.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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