"A Little Museum of Someone's Life" — Estate Sales in Austin, North Texas, and Beyond
Visiting an estate sale is one of the most indirect but intimate ways of trying to understand a person you have never met. Instead of through their work, their personality, or their physical features, a person shopping at or working at an estate sale experiences a person (sometimes dead, but not always) through what they may have loved, merely tolerated but ultimately did not or would not throw away. A person’s possessions, in their own home, now laid out for display to potential buyers; a lifetime of collecting soon to be dispersed into other homes, and then another cycle. Almost three years ago, Estate Services of Austin oversaw the estate sale of John Aielli, a DJ and Austin eccentric (I saw him not once but at least twice cutting his toenails on the front porch at Cherrywood Coffee). It was a little sensation — people stood for hours to have the chance to browse his belongings (quite a bit of which was a paean to the male form).
It’s obvious why there’s a market for estate sale services, especially when a person dies suddenly. The grief may be too much for the family to bear, the accumulations too difficult to shuffle through. The impulse may be to keep too much or throw away items that may seem worthless to you but might be meaningful to someone else. This was my surface understanding, having been to less than ten estate sales in my life. To learn more, I spoke with three people who all experience estate sales differently: my wife, Leah Churner, solely an estate sale shopper; Sara Jane Colgin, a friend who shopped at estate sales in the Los Angeles area in a professional capacity but who now lives in Austin and only shops for fun; and Stacie Bodine, who works on the sales end in North Texas at Kings Attic Estate Sales.
We’ll begin from the outside and work our way in — from shopper to seller. “I've always liked thrifting, vintage shopping. And most of the stuff in thrift stores and vintage stores comes from estate sales, so it's kind of like going one step ahead of that pipeline and getting in on the ground floor,” Leah tells me. “Seeing what's there, seeing what's cool, seeing what kind of fun deals you can get, or interesting items from the past. A lot of times you can get stuff that is useful and you don't want to buy it new. It's just kind of an ethos of reduce and reuse, you know.” Among these: “Things like garden hoses, bird baths, garden tools. Napkins, like linens and cloth napkins, stuff like that.”
Leah began going to estate sales when she moved back to Austin from New York and got plugged into the estate sale pipeline through EstateSales.net. Aside from great deals on napkins, etc., Leah confesses that she also relishes just a bit in “nosiness.” “I just like going into people's houses, and seeing their stuff and seeing what their life was like. And I guess it is a little bit morbid, but I treat every house like it's a little museum of someone's life. Everything is staged, so it's not exactly as it was left, but when it looks similar, you see what they have and what was important to them. I think it's more that I like period interiors… a lot of estate sales are going to be people who maybe recently passed away, so they were in their 80s. A lot of times the house will be like a time capsule of the '70s or the '80s, and the '60s even, and that could be really interesting to see the architecture and how people decorated their homes. Kitchens used to be much smaller — houses used to be much smaller.”
For the Austin estate sale curious, she provides her must-visits and least favorite locales. “I love a 78704 sale. There's a lot of good stuff in South Austin, obviously, from the 70s. A lot of the houses down here were built in the '70s. The older the neighborhood, the better the estate sales, I think. So there are really good estate sales around UT…like professors’ houses. Hyde Park, Travis Heights, over by Pease Park, like the Allendale kind of area. The less good ones to me are going be the ones that are in Dripping Springs or in West Lake, like in the suburbs. They're less appealing to me because it's going be construction that was usually built in the '80s or later, and you’re not going to find those time capsule houses there.”
Every estate sale has its own flavor, but sometimes flavors commingle with unhappy results. “I've seen enough rooster decorations,” explains Leah. “I’ve seen enough bed linens, like, I don't know why anyone would want that. They sometimes try to sell toiletries and stuff and food, and it's just very weird.” Leah remembers, more fondly, that “I've been to a lot of estate sales that are truly bizarre…it's fun when someone was a tenured professor at UT for a long time that has an extensive library, but even like in Zilker/Barton Hills, there's a lot of just weird, weird interiors where you'll see red carpet, shag carpet and game rooms that are just bizarre. It's also just a low-cost pastime, you know? Now, it is shopping. Ladies be shopping, but it's not like you have to shop — you don't have to buy anything. You can just go browse.”
Sara Colgin entered in the estate sale market when she set up a company called Saco + Nova with her friend Noelle Valentino to resell estate sale finds after they had been spruced up, possibly fixed, and then staged artistically for purchase (the website is still up, but they are no longer active as a company). Valentino studied art appraisal and had an eye for estate sale finds. She was looking for someone to help display her purchases for even further purchase, and she and Colgin got along so well they went into business. “It was perfect because she could find the art. She could eye the art, and I was looking for all the props and decor pieces that she otherwise had zero interest in,” Colgin says. Colgin was working as an art director for film and television, “looking for stuff for sets and decorating my house. And simultaneously we wanted to take photos that we would incorporate the art [Valentino was purchasing], to make it more appealing to sell. I would look for pieces to basically accompany her art to stage these photos, and it ended up being a blast.” Like Leah, she especially enjoys homes frozen in time. “We started finding the best estate sales, because you can find a house in Beverly Hills that hasn’t been touched since the '50s. And it was like candy for us.”
Of the many good flips Colgin encountered as part of Saco + Nova, nothing surpasses one incredible bar cart acquisition from a Beverly Hills home. “I wanted this brass, big-wheeled bar cart,” she reminisces. “I could see the glass [on the top of the cart] was broken…so they sold it to me for $40. And then I was buying more stuff, and I was like, ‘You forgot to include the bar cart’s $40 price’. And they were like, ‘Can you just put it in your car? Get it out of here.’” After purchasing a $20 pane of replacement glass, Colgin staged the piece for sale. “It ended up being a symbol of how we resold, because I ended up trying to sell things that were affordable, because L.A. is not affordable. I listed it on our site for $200. It wasn't selling. I'm like, ‘What? This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.’ And I read somewhere that there's not a market for that in L.A. So I raised it to $400 and I got four offers. Oh my God. Know what you're worth, I guess.”
My final interviewee is Stacie Bodine, a sister of a friend of mine. Bodine now works full-time planning and running estate sales in the Dallas area, but her interest in her now-profession began when she was very young. “I remember going to sales with my grandmother and my great-grandmother and my grandfather when I was really, really young,” she says. “I remember my mom always talking about me being young and always saying, ‘Honey, go shopping! Because that's what we call our grandmother, Honey. I was always talking about, ‘Honey, go shopping! When are we going to go shopping?'” Bodine graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington, where she studied “art history, photography, that type of stuff.” When Bodine graduated and “found myself looking for a job,” Honey’s brother and his wife introduced Bodine to an individual who ran estate sales. “I worked with him, and it was just enough for me to dip my toes in the water and get a taste for how awesome and exciting this line of work can be if you're the right person.” She moved on to another estate sale company, then another called Attics to Basements in 2017. About the estate sale business, she tells me that “there's not really any book, experience or knowledge or training module or anything like that to prepare you for this line of work. It's kind of uncharted territory. There's not a governing body or a set of rules or any sort of standard.”
I wondered if estate sales were mostly held for someone who passed away, but Bodine said not necessary. “The reason that we do estate sales varies tremendously. It could be that somebody’s passed away, or somebody’s going to assisted living, or somebody’s getting divorced, or the kids are out of the house and the parents are ready to move to a cabin in the woods with everything new. There’s sometimes people whose clients are in federal prison for committing Medicaid fraud. There’s a list of reasons why they would need our services, and it's not always a sad story. We do moving sales a lot, too.”
Bodine walked me through what it was like to actually stage an estate sale. After her company is hired, Bodine’s boss does a walkthrough, discusses “what the projected profit will be and how long it will take to set it up — if it’s a hoarder house, it may take a little bit longer, and we may have to postpone the sale.” After the paperwork is signed, “we’ll go into the house…we’ll start getting everything out of the closets, the garage, everywhere.” After the items are brought out from all over the house, “the crew, a group of ladies, will go in,” and then rooms are designated for certain items (e.g., linens, “Christmas stuff”).
“We unpack everything, we get everything out and set it on tables, and then we take pictures of everything and then we price it all. On Monday, we're setting everything up and Tuesday we're pricing and finalizing. Hopefully we don't have to come back on Wednesday to finish up anything, but it happens often that we have to go in on Wednesdays and work until the wee hours to get ready. Sometimes clients like to bring out new stuff that they decided they wanted to sell, and that they didn't want to sell at first…and then Thursday, Friday and Saturday, we have our sales.”
My understanding was that some estate sales pepper a house with another estate’s unsold goods, but Bodine’s company does not do this. “We don't keep any of the inventory to resell at another date. We don't have a warehouse where we store things that didn’t sell. We aim for total liquidation. We want everything gone — that’s generally what’s best for the client and that’s what our objective is.” I asked what items Bodine found hardest or easiest to sell: “I cannot easily answer that, because it completely depends on the neighborhood and the items. Like yesterday, at the sale that I was working, the house had a 1967 Chevy Nova. It was very red and it was in amazing condition. We had it listed for $28,000 and somebody purchased it the first 10 minutes when we were open.” Regulars are the lifeblood of any operation, but estate sales are unique in that individuals may be coming to buy particular types of items — or even the same items — but for entirely different reasons. Bodine mentions an artist and former adjunct professor at UTA [Bodine identifies him by name after our conversation — Troy Benthall] who buys china, breaks it, and then creates tile mosaic art out of the carnage.
I wanted to know if, through her work, Bodine encountered other people who brought their kids to estate sales, or if there were people she regularly sees over the years. “So many,” she says. “My daughter's five and a half now. I've been doing estate sales with this company since 2017, and I’ve seen people at these estate sales from before my child was born. One of the guys that has known me since my daughter was — you know, my hand across my stomach — I see him at least once a month. He's a gold and silver buyer, and he is great. He is one of our regulars, and my daughter loves him. It’s a nice little niche group to be in, because you get so much knowledge about so much stuff, and you meet so many people from all walks of life. We have a guy that comes in and buys all of our scrap metal, like aluminum, copper — stuff like that at the end of the sales. And we've watched his boys grow up over the years because he would always bring his boys with him, and they would load up all the stuff. It’s awesome to see people like that on the regular, which makes it a little more of a familiar scene, because it’s an unfamiliar immediate setting.”
I thought I was done with this piece after speaking to Bodine, but Leah suggested that what I had written was incomplete given that I hadn’t really said how I felt about my own experiences at an estate sale, and suggested we go to one this past Saturday in north Austin. Run by Blue Moon Estate Sales, this particular estate sale took place in one half a duplex. The sale had begun a day before, so this was the final day — everything was 50% off. We all lined up outside around 10am, and groups were escorted into the house in waves. Leah was looking for more garden implements, I was looking for books and records, and we both ended up slightly disappointed.
The ELO albums displayed in the catalog for the sale were long gone, leaving just Smothers Brothers and Lily Tomlin records to hold down the crate. Many books remained, but were helpings of Chicken Soup for the Soul, Kids Say the Darndest Things, The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank, Pro Life Answers to Pro Choice Arguments and crap by Glenn Beck. A curious, half-electronic drum set was already sold. Leah picked up one wooden spoon and then decided she could live without it. However, if treasure was easy to find (and 50% off) hunting it wouldn’t really be fun, just simply shopping. Somewhere out there, someone into Christian books and harlequin masks could have had a very exciting morning indeed. You just never know.
