The house is...EMPTY!

My most dreaded part of this entire project is over! We have emptied the entire house! Wahoo!

This place was packed full of stuff. The house has SO much storage, everywhere you turn there are cabinets and closets and niches which is a really good thing except...they were all FULL of stuff that had to be sorted and removed. 

We hired Steve O'Daniel, his wonderful wife Melissa and his two hard-working teenaged boys to help us with this part. We originally had planned to have our own auction, but after Steve rummaged a bit through our stuff, he really didn't think we would make enough to warrant our own sale. We had a lot of stuff, but nothing that we could price really high and make money on. Plus with the set up and advertising time it would be about 6 weeks before the sale!

Instead he suggested a junk auction. His fee would be much lower for this. They would haul everything to the auction site for a flat price, then the place takes a cut of the sale price and we get the rest of the profit. The timeline was shorter and we were guaranteed to get rid of everything. We were SOLD!

They got started last week-end (February 12th) and worked for about 5 hours on Sunday. Then we came down this past week-end. Brad had off Friday so we got in a few hours on Friday afternoon before Steve and the crew joined us about 5:30 to work a good hour and a half. 

When I walked in on Friday I was blown away with how much they had done in just one day's work. They had taken two loads and almost all of the big stuff was gone. They had also taken most of the books! 

Friday afternoon I got to work on the laundry room. We had discovered that almost everything in the under-cabinets was family stuff that had to be sorted. Lots of pictures and scrapbooks etc. These are the things that take all the time and I was the only one that could make those hard decisions of what was important. Brad boxed up all the rest of the books in the office and we helped Steve fill up the trailer for one big load. 

Saturday we worked from about 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and got almost the entire house empty! I still had to finish the laundry room and everyone else got the other rooms almost done. The kids were well taken care of by P&G and didn't even come over to bother us once. Papa took the boys to the OSU basketball game all by himself and they had a ball. Genevieve was in good hands with Gaga and when she needed to eat, Gaga would just call me and I'd run over real quick. 

Sunday we started about 9:30 and by 11:30 we were done!

It felt so good to see the house emptying up and Steve and his crew were SO fast. What would have taken me months and months to sort and box and move, they had flying out the door. 

The laundry room. Remember all those books? Two closets and a million cabinets all empty! They also took the washer/dryer AND deep freeze!

The task center was interesting. Those two drawers were the definition of junk drawers. Hair ties from when Lane and I were little, Grandma's cigarette filters, random bills/pictures/notes/letters, all sorts of office odds and ends and those little red, white and blue gummed stars that Grandma used to stick to all her letters. There was also a record player that hooked to a main intercom that controlled the other intercoms that were in every room. Oh, and two bottles of margarita mix.

I was so intimidated by this room. There were two huge filing cabinets full of documents, thousands of books, yucky old furniture and ew, the bath covered in newspaper clippings and pictures of naked girls. I was so busy sorting the laundry room that I didn't even have to work on this one though. 

It is such a dark room. I really hope once the paneling comes down and the door is replaced by a full glass panel door it will lighten up.

That newspaper is where Melissa was showing me how to scrape off popcorn ceilings. She said if they haven't been painted they would come right off. She tried here first and it wouldn't budge. She was boggled because it really looked like it hadn't been painted. We tried it in two other rooms and sure enough it just fell off like nothing. We concluded that since this is where Ronnie spent most of his time, the nicotine had just glazed over it to glue it to the ceiling. Yuck.

The kitchen was one of the last rooms to be empty. When Grandma died, we took everything of sentimental value like dishes, silver, trays etc. So there wasn't much left. But somehow the cabinets were still full. Endless supplies of plastic cups, the same spices from probably when Grandma moved in, turkey basting bags from the seventies and 39 cent food coloring were some of my favorite finds. There was cat medicine in with the silverware and bills in with the utensils. A clove of garlic in the cabinet and some of my china in the dishwasher (along with two refrigerater magnets!?). It was an interesting dig. I did find some fun old match boxes and little mint tins as well as cute little pronged forks for appetizers that are very 60s. 

We got the fridge gone! And the trash compactor! But the others are hooked up to gas and water and we need a specialist to come unhook them.

The pantry wasn't too much fun. There was a lot of really old food and some jars full of unlabeled liquid that Brad joked was urine...and he's probably right. I did find some neat-o jars though! I have big plans for this pantry!

 Here's the O'Daniel crew. They were AMAZING. I loved spending the week-end with them! They were fun, professional, nice, and fast! Their youngest, Trevor, is a huge OSU fan. We didn't find out until after the first run to the auction. He made his dad wait until the LAST item to try and buy some old OSU glasses and he won them for $19! I was so mad at Melissa and Steve for not telling me he loved OSU because Grandma's house was FULL of Cowboy stuff. She insisted that when they do this, they make their boys buy anything they find that they want and use their own money. Well, this week-end anytime I found something I would give it to her and say, "Can he please have this?" Little stuff she would smile and take, but anything she thought would sell, she made me put it on the trailer. I'd say, "That will only sell for like a dollar!" And she'd say, "well, that is a dollar in your pocket."

They also found buyers for the big stuff that should bring more money than what we would have made at the junk auction. For example, the piano. Steve said the last time he saw a piano, it sold for $7.50! He found a buyer to buy ours for $50. He also found someone to buy my dad's childhood wagon wheel bedroom set, the grandfather clock, and the dining room table set.

Here's their set-up. Counting that first Sunday, we took 10 trailer loads to auction!

Almost everything in the house went to the auction. But what did we do with what didn't? We put it in a huge trash pile in the garage! Once we get the construction dumpster, it will all go in there, but for now, here it is:

 Not too bad considering how much stuff was in there! We even got most of the window treatments down. See those blue dupioni silk drapes? It made me a little sick to think about how much money my grandma must have spent on window treatments! They were all custom made, dupioni silk with yards and yards of fabric. They were lined with matching valences, complimentary sheers, and some even had custom roller shades covered in the same fabric as the drapes! However, I don't think they had ever been cleaned and with the fading, the smell, and the stuck-on cat hair, there was no way they were salvagable!

 Hooray for an empty house!