I went through your underwear drawer…
I spend a lot of time going through people’s underwear drawers. And their medicine cabinets. And that weird cabinet over the refrigerator.
I’m not a burglar, promise.
My husband and I own an estate sale company in the Pacific Northwest and let me tell you, I’ve seen some things. Weird things, cool things, dead things…
I’ve been in dirty hoarder houses, multi million dollar mansions, high end condos and the tiny warbox up the street (literally, I walked home from that sale every day.)
People are weird, they keep weird stuff, they think weird stuff is important. They wrap all of their stuff in toilet paper and store it in boxes under the eaves. If one of these is good, then surely ten of them is even better. Everyone always claims ‘there’s no way all of this stuff was in this house,’ but let me tell you, go home and start pulling stuff out of all your cabinets and closets, you’d be surprised.
Everyone wants to know…what’s the weirdest, most expensive…well that can be summed up all in one item. A tank, we sold a tank. An M5A1 Stuart tank. Yep. They had to bring a little crane to load it onto their truck.
What else? Sometimes the coolest things aren’t things we are selling. We were once doing a sale at a house right on the shores of Puget Sound and five minutes before we opened the doors in the morning a whole pod of Orcas swam by. At the end of the day when the homeowner returned I excitedly told him about what we had seen. I have never seen a man get so disappointed, so fast- ‘I’ve lived here for thirty years and I’ve never seen a single Orca.’
You probably want to know about the dead stuff, huh? Almost every house with an attic, garage or basement I have ever been in has rats or mice. You probably have them too, don’t be embarrassed. Once, a lady asked if she could have a discount on her purchase because she set her very expensive purse down on some rat poop in the basement and now she was going to have to get it cleaned. She did not get a discount.
So, about those underwear drawers…I’m not sure when or how keeping your secret stuff hidden under your panties became a thing, but people hide some interesting stuff in there. I always feel like a TV show detective when I do the “drawer sweep” with my hands. I’ve found a few handguns, a whole lot of sex toys and once, the saddest Dear John letter I have ever read. And why does everyone keep all those extra buttons? Have you ever been able to find “that button” when you lost one?
Medicine cabinet? Expiration dates people. Vintage bathrooms are cool. Vintage diaper cream is not. If your kids don’t wear diapers anymore you can probably throw that away. And what’s with that bar of yellow soap everyone has? The weird cabinet over the fridge? Don’t bother, everything up there is sticky.
