Re: Letting things go

Posted by johhnyx on October 15, 2008 at 09:26:10 from (165.170.128.65):

In Reply to: Letting things go posted by 37chief on October 13, 2008 at 19:36:04:

I can relate a lot to that. When my Dad died back in 2000, he had a house, cottages, business, and two barns (and a chicken coop!) filled with antiques and "stuff" from his business, etc. We did find some old 50 year original business documents that were kind of cool to see, records from how they did things 40+ years ago. He had a 1930 antique car that had basically not moved out of that garage except once or twice in 40 years (long as I was alive then). My Mom had decided to sell so we also rented roll-offs and filled several.

We sold much stuff on ebay, and gave her a pretty darn good return of quite a few thousands, not counting what she unloaded herself at garage and estate sales. The car alone sold for over 6000, and some old horse-drawn wagons sold for a couple thousand. It was amazing to me how much people paid for old junk. I sold a cracked block tractor engine in pieces for a 100 or so. (probably worth more today in scrap)

My favorite was the rusty old Rupp go-kart that we found in the barn from when we were kids. My brother chucked it into the dumpster, but I pulled it out and washed it off, because I thought it might be worth $50 or so on ebay. I was pretty surprised when it went for over $1500; there are a lot of old "junk" collectors out there with too much money and not enough sense I guess.

It was certainly a lot of work taking digital pictures of everything and making ebay ads, and the process wasn't as streamlined as it is today. And some items sold for not much more than what it cost to ship them, like $5-$10 or so, so in retrospect, some of it was not too productive, time-wise. Not that we paid for the shipping ourselves, but just the time tracking ads, emails, keeping track of checks and money orders and the packing/shipping took a lot of time. But at least it kept my Mom busy!! (which is good after a loss)

I'm glad I did end up with a lot of pictures of stuff on some CDs. What I need to do now is spend some time writing down what I can remember about some of the stuff, and how it relates to interesting (to us, anyway) family memories.

So now I have mostly just the "digital clutter", which is maybe just as bad! We had about a 40 acre little gentlemen's farm, which I ended up walking completely around and taking pictures of from every angle, with a tape recording of stuff I remembered as I went. I do look at that from time to time and enjoy the memories of where we built a treehouse, where my brother broke his arm, etc. At least that doesn't take up as much space.

I wish I would have had space to take the car. It was pretty original and restorable. My Dad was smart enough to resist my pleas to make it into a street rod when I was 17 or so. Just didn't have the space for another car "project" at that time.

Good Luck!
J.

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