Relitigating Marie Kondo

A while back, this article about estate sales was discussed as a Metafilter thread. And yeah, there are the usual Metafilter-person-wanting-to-prove-they-are-smarter-and-better-than-the-room comments on there, but one person noted that we do give an *awful* lot of moral weight to "whether or not you own a lot of stuff" when it's really more a result of temperament, and I am inclined to agree with that.

I am a "clutter" person. I like having things around me. Having these things makes me feel a bit less rootless and isolated - as a person without a family.

It may also be tied up with the complicated idea of "taking up space in the world." Inside my house is one place where I feel like I can take up space. (How many of us women, part of the reason we try to diet, is really so we take up less space? And how many heavy people are given the impression by the world that they take up too much space? I mean, metaphorically, but also sometimes actually)

But I can also understand the desire to have few things - you have less to worry about, less to dust and clean and find storage for.

And as that article points out: less for your heirs to have to deal with when you're gone.

I've never gone to an *actual* estate sale - in the sense of "this person died and here's their stuff." They were less common where I lived (and the milieu I moved in) than yard sales, which tended more to be "here's stuff we don't want any more/that our kids have outgrown."

I actually haven't been to a yard sale in a long time. Sometimes in the past I went to them quite a lot (mainly looking for things for my doll collection). Somewhere along the way I learned that about 95% of yard sales were stuff I didn't want - cast off kids' clothes, slightly warped kitchen plasticware, maybe a few Happy Meal toys the kids got tired of. Once in a while there was a good one, usually in an "older" section of town, usually given by an older person who was either moving to a smaller home, or moving in with a relative, and was getting rid of the accumulation of a life.

But yes. I can see the "archaeology" of estate sales and perhaps the reason I never went to one was that it would make me slightly sad. (I didn't go to the estate sale after Steve died, and there's one planned for the couple I knew from church and I don't think I'll go to that one, either). And yes, there is that memento mori whisper to it - I could go to one of those and I know I'd "hear" during it "Someday, this will be your niece or your friends doing this with your stuff" and I. Don't. Like. That.

But there are a couple of other comments people made that resonated:

- Estate sales and other "sales" of used stuff are environmentally friendly. It is definitely preferable to purchase something used-but-still-good from an environmental/resource standpoint than to buy new

- More importantly (selfishly) to me: wood furniture like chests of drawers and bookshelves were *better made* pre-1960s, and if you can find what you need at a yard or estate sale, you should buy it. To get a decent bookcase now, that's the easiest way. (If you know someone who does carpentry, sometimes you an commission one; there are still a few shops that do real-wood furniture build to your specs, but of course you pay for it.). I would probably *not* buy upholstered furniture used these days....have heard too many stories of people getting bed bugs and I remember how my brother and his college roommates wound up with cockroach problems from a donated couch.

- The "market" for stuff is incredibly volatile; a number of people pointing out that people in their late 20s and 30s are still minimalists because of difficulties for that generation in buying houses and "settling down" though I think there are still enough collectors that things like good mid-century furniture (especially "designer" furniture) sells well and for a fair amount of money.

- Pickers. Oh man. That's mainly why I don't bother with yard sales and the like any more. All too often pickers get there before the opening, buy up everything "nice" and then leave. I remember the yard sale we did at church to try to raise money for the youth group; we had a few nice "vintage" things (a couple of original paint-by-number paintings at the time a few years back when those were very hot, some vintage glassware) and someone came *as we were setting up* and offered to buy all those things....and I will say, they offered a price a good bit lower than the one we had put on them. I told them we were not ready for sales yet and that those prices were firm (the person who donated the stuff was fairly insistent). I think we *did* wind up selling those things later on but yeah, it left a bad taste in my mouth, the sheer level of entitlement - coming early when we weren't open yet AND demanding a "special" price first off in the day. (I would have negotiated more freely - and did, and I told the other people working there to do so - as the end of the day approached. But not before we were open!)

- And yeah, yard sales are an awful wait to have to raise money (after that one time, we all decided, as a Youth Group, that a better fund raiser was for us to travel around and do yardwork for people who would hire us, and they could pay us as a "donation") and also an awful way to get rid of stuff - you never actually get rid of everything, and sometimes you get rid of few enough things (and make little enough money) that the whole day is a waste. I suspect that's why people with an estate to dispose of hire a company that will cart the stuff off if it doesn't sell.

And yes, it would be fun to have time to go to sales like that - to search for that one treasure amid the dross - but given how little time I have now? I admit I'm more prone to go to antique shops, where presumably a lot of that stuff has been "picked" from estate or yard sales, and pay the higher rate, just to not have to drive to some distant housing development and try to find a place to park and maybe find that the only things on offer are out-grown kids' clothes and half-worn-out kitchen stuff.