My Day At The Clean-Out Circus

When you get a house full of stuff you have to do something about it. I’ve been in this situation with abandoned tenant possessions and with homes where the sellers didn’t want to deal with the mess. The tenant situation is thornier – you have certain obligations regarding their “personal property” which usually consist of things like a couch with a stain, a pair of wood crutches, and empty pizza boxes. I won’t get into the specifics, but I will say document everything and read up on the current landlord-tenant rules.

In our current case, we were the in the latter situation – a seller leaving us a mess. We got a house where mom died and then dad lived alone for a while. When he was moved out the place sat vacant for seven years. Needless to say, the house fell into some disrepair – some of which surely dated to when the house actually was occupied. Moreover there was a lot of stuff left behind. A lot of stuff.

As I’m probably like the 25th person in the door since the move-out, I know there isn’t much of value left behind. I’m always hoping for a gun collection or a stack of $100 bills under the mattress or something. It doesn’t always work out like that. But the seedy side of me, that part that likes to stop by garage sales and bring things home that make my wife cringe, likes to take a look around.

I spent an hour rummaging through the house, looking to see what was there. This was a good time to explore and to get more familiar with the bones of the house. There were things like yard tools and kitchen pots and beat up furniture (some of which were antiques, in fact).

I depleted the house of things I wanted – there was a few boxes of .22 ammo, a small propane heater, and a Rolex watch. Okay, well two of the three – you figure out which. Now I needed what was left to go away – all of it.

Paying someone to come in and haul it all away is a good option – the more beat the stuff, the better an option it is. But the junk hound in me saw there were some things of value – not much value, granted. In the past I had already ruled out charities that come and pick up belongings. They are slow – usually booked up several weeks in advance, and they are picky, understandably, as they’re looking to resell.

Since bad ideas are always coming my way, my mind sprang to action. How much of this stuff could I have people haul away for me – free, that is? With that I took some pictures and placed a Craigslist ad under the “free” section. The ad was, essentially, “Open house – Saturday morning – take anything you want – everything is free”. I attached the pictures and a list of sample items.

I knew this would be entertaining. I was not disappointed.

Saturday morning I arrived at ten minutes to eight. There was a line of thirty people or so already waiting. As I opened the doors, the circus began – people rushing in, me handing out “Jay Buys Houses” flyers. All sorts of crap began to be carried out the front and back door. I could barely inch by the crowd to get all the lights turned on. Anything that looked marginally useful was gone in minutes.

I watched as broken furniture was carried out, people took old shoes, anything resembling a tool or implement was pounced on like it was Christmas morning. The parade of people kept up steadily for at least two hours. Mid-morning I had a metal scrap guy pull out any remaining metal – abandoned appliances, bed frames, pieces of rusty pipe.

As the time was wrapping up I surveyed the damage. It looked like a tornado had hit the house. This I had expected. Actually it looked pretty rough before any of this chaos came through. But to my delight the contents of the house were much less. No takers on the moldy recliner, but pretty much 90% of all wood furniture was gone, and scads of other stuff! Now it’s time to call the junk haulers and pay to make the lightened load go away.