365 Project – Day 181 – For Sale

It has been a looooong week and we are all exhausted from the housecleaning/emptying marathon, but by God we can finally see the finish line. Barely, but at least it’s there.

Of all the days that we have spent at Grandma Luethje’s house sorting through boxes and arranging the contents on tables and shelves for the upcoming estate sale, I would have to say that today was, hands down, the most difficult of all. Today, my friends, was Avon Day.

Grandma and Grandpa have been avid Avon collectors for years. Some of my first childhood memories are holidays spent at their house in Bertrand, and I can clearly recall the entire basement being lined with shelves that were full of Avon. They’ve been at it so long, my Dad can’t even tell me when the collecting began. But the years and years of it yielded boxes and boxes and shelves and shelves of figurines, plates, perfume bottles, bath salts, powders, lipsticks, books, mugs, beer steins, and much, much more.

Today, Mom, Aunt Vinnetta and I spent hours carrying boxes up from the basement, examining their contents, pulling out collections and arranging them on shelves. Unfortunately, we ran out of shelf space long before we ran out of Avon, and there are still over 20 bulging boxes stacked in the laundry room and garage. My cousin Forrest and I both found a couple pieces that we liked and packed away to take home with us, but we don’t know what we’re going to do with the rest of it, or if anyone will even be interested in buying it at the sale, but we’re hoping that someone will enjoy some of it as much as Grandma and Grandpa did. Here are a few of the pieces we found today…

As for the rest of the sale, I’d say we have some pretty fun stuff that is going to be finding a new home very soon. As I mentioned in a previous blog, Grandma and Grandpa weren’t the type to be wasteful or careless about anything, and they saved, saved, saved. While some of the items in the house may be pretty ancient, I’ll be damned if everything isn’t intact and in pretty good working working order. We’ve got everything you could possibly want on this sale–silverware, silver tea sets, Depression glass, china sets, vintage records, furniture, bedroom sets, old salt ‘n pepper shakers, figurines, yarn and other miscellaneous sewing supplies, tools, old heavy duty rubbermaid containers, an assortment of kitchen appliances, crystal dishes, and much, much more.

Grandma and Grandpa spent a fair share of time and money visiting auctions and antique shops over the years, and they managed to amass a pretty impressive collection. After walking through the house today to take a few photos for the flyers and advertisements I’m going to be making for the sale, I thought I’d go ahead and share a few here tonight as sort of a sneak preview. If you like anything you see here, you just might want to mark you calendar once we set a date for the sale, because there is a whoooooole lot more where this came from.

Tonight’s 365 Project is dedicated to my Grandma and Grandpa Luethje and all the fun they had collecting over the years. All we can hope is that the other collectors out there will appreciate all of this as much as they did.