Given the preponderance of successful fabric finds at garage/yard sales and estate sales, I thought I'd try attending estate sales. I'd never attended one before, although I am the periodic drive-by garage/yard sale participant.
In a yard sale, the owners are there, usually, and alive. As you peruse their stuff, as odd as it may be, there is explicit permission from the owner of the items. They're sitting there, they've chosen this stuff to sell, they want to get rid of it, they want to make room in their lives for something else (including cash).
At an estate sale, it is usually INSIDE a person's home, that person is deceased or in a nursing home, but in either case, NOT present, and may have had little to any choice about the disposition of their belongings (unless they had a strong last will and testament).
Depending on who is running the estate sale, the "presence" of the owner is stronger or weaker. At a clearly professional sale we attended a week ago, the rooms had been re-arranged as "boutiques" in a way. The sense that the person had lived there was minimized-- all books were in one room, all clothes in another, all kitchen items in another. The house had been transformed into a store of sorts.
At the estate sale I attended yesterday, the organizers were clearly not professional or experienced (in large part by having only one person at the check-out, resulting in a LONG line of people holding one or two items in their arms).
They had "organized" (or not) each room by what was already IN that room, and as I went from room to room, the previous tenant's "presence" was still very much alive. I felt like a sneak, a voyeur, pawing through her closet of clothes, her desk drawers. In the pocket of one of her jackets was a used tissue and a tube of chapstick. I felt like she would walk in at any moment and ask "What are you doing wearing my jacket?"
Worse: the garage-- the "store" for the exercise equipment and tools, etc. was also the storage place of this woman's business life. Cardboard filing boxes were grouped in one area, some without lids and one could glimpse the titles on the files and notebooks. Her career-- successful or otherwise-- loaded into boxes.
It was then I had to leave. I came home quite disturbed at the state of our house. If we died together tomorrow, WHO would unload this stuff, and what would we have done to make it easier for them? Would someone peruse my home, my rooms, go through my drawers and decide, oh yeah, my husband would enjoy seeing me in THIS!?
What would happen to my photo albums, and the trunk of journals I'd kept from age 9 to 39? What about my portfolios of drawings and paintings going back to high school, and some as recent as a few months ago?
Ugh...
Anyway, I probably won't stop going to estate sales-- the finds you promote here are too tempting to ignore. But I sure am learning about what sort of emotional armor I need to don as soon as I walk onto the property...
-- Jillaine