Black Thumb Syndrome

When Timothy Loughmiller Estate Solutions hosts an estate sale, we price EVERY OBJECT, unlike many companies that run sales. Pricing everything is a laborious, time-consuming process (which is why many don't attend to this detail) but it's VERY important to do.

To speed the process up, often we will write the price right on some objects (mostly glass and metal items) with a felt-tip marker - one, it's quick, and two, it doesn't damage the item because it wipes right off again with your thumb - which brings us to the topic of this story.

Occasionally (but more often than we'd like) a customer will bring an unpriced item to the cashout, hoping to literally get a steal of a deal. I say unpriced, but recall that earlier I stated that we price EVERYTHING. So, what happened to the price?

Now, I won't say that anything untoward is afoot, however, a cursory examination of the customer's hands will reveal that, yes, the dreaded "Black Thumb" syndrome has yet again affected another unfortunate buyer.

I say unfortunate because there is only one cure for this dread disease - the automatic doubling of what the price would have been before it mysteriously vanished (five dollars becomes ten, ten dollars becomes twenty, and so on). Many times the stricken individual will resist treatment, and sometimes, astonishingly, they will blurt out "but it said such-and-such price before!" (how could they know?).

Fortunately, though, once a particular customer is so treated, they seldom experience a recurrence of (drum roll please) the dreaded Black Thumb Syndrome!

Let's hope it never affects YOU!

Hoarder's House of Dolls

Last summer my company was contracted to sell the contents of a collector's home - or, more accurately, to liquidate a hoarder's house.

By the time I'd arrived on the scene, the family had already emptied the main floor, making my job simpler, right? WRONG! The main floor may have been empty, but the basement certainly wasn't, and that's where the fun began.

For three weeks we painfully dug through the 2,000 square-foot basement, sometimes sleeping there, gradually bringing upstairs the treasures(?) from the depths of the basement. By the time we were done we'd completely filled the upstairs, and still had a basement full of stuff - essentially two floors stuffed with articles for sale. It was scary.

A partial list included a half-dozen polka accordians, twelve short-wave radios, 1,000 articles of clothing, 250 cameras, roughly 400 pieces of china, 3,000 LP records, 2,000 books, 100 pairs of shoes, dozens of power tools many still in boxes, 150 square feet of Christmas decorations, eight typewriters, ten movie projectors, 200 VHS tapes, a dozen wool carpets, dozens of lamps, six telescopes, and, of course, over 300 dolls.

We had a kitchen sink to sell, and the Christmas decorations even included a partridge in a pear tree!

It took three days of continuous selling to make a dent in all of this, and buyers would buy, go away, come back, buy more, go away again, then come back for more. They'd fill boxes with stuff, take it home, and bring the empty boxes back to fill over and over again - we came to know everyone by name.

"100,000 Items for Sale!" our newspaper ads proudly proclaimed, making us a local sensation for a week, and a legend for a month or more. We sold and sold and sold. Through all of this, we had only one complaint, that coming from some sharp-eyed customer who coyly quipped "There's no way there's 100,000 items for sale in here! It's more like 300,000!"

Hmmm. No wonder I was tired!

My Life Inside Estate Sales

For 20 years I've been active in the field of Estate Sales, Antiques and Collectibles. Over the past two decades I've accumulated a number of stories from Inside the World of Estate Sales, many funny, some sad, but all entertaining and revealing. I hope through this blog to reveal many of those inside stories, as well as general observations and wisdoms from both inside and outside of the business of hosting estate sales through my business Timothy Loughmiller Estate Solutions