Not a phrase I ever thought I would utter, but we do, in fact, have 12 couches. At our condo, we used to joke that we knew we’d made it because we had 5 couches (3 lovely leather pieces, 1 cloth couch, and a chaise). I mean, that’s a lot of couches, right?
Ha, no, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, bub. At the Hivestead we discovered that we were now the proud owners of another 7 couches. Two of them are kind of decent, but not our style, white leather. Four of them are white vinyl, and the last one is some godawful floral thing that fortunately was hidden away in the guest bedroom. Those 7 plus our 5 = 12.
The Hivestead had been left essentially unoccupied for 3 years, give or take. The previous owners had left most of their stuff in it which made it show both better and worse. Better because their stuff made it seem homey and gave a sense of who they were. Worse because they had tastes that were definitely stuck in the 70’s, and that, apparently, was why it was on the market for so long; people who saw it didn’t like their style and couldn’t see past it. In any case, when we made our offer, we were asked if we would like to buy everything in the house for $3,000. We declined, and were met with a counter-offer: how about we just GIVE you everything for free? Sold! We did give them $1 in consideration so that it would be legally ours, of course.
So in addition to the 7 couches, we also took ownership of god only knows how many different sets of dishes (we have, I am not kidding, enough dishes to simultaneously serve well over 100 people, with some to spare), clothes, sewing equipment and supplies, tables and chairs, tools, books, a few pieces of jewelry, shotgun shells, bear mace, a dozen or so paintings, and enough old booze to potentially intoxicate or poison (if it’s turned) several fraternities worth of brosephs. Everything (including the booze) is from the 60’s through the 90’s – it’s like a time capsule.
We are moving all of their stuff into the great room – it’s about 30′ x 30′ so there’s ample space – so that we can go about cleaning out the rest of the place and getting our stuff moved in. Once we get everything organized we will be having the mother of all estate sales and hopefully clearing a few thousand bucks in the deal, which will be nice.