The staff of Carol’s Helping Hands, an Oregon estate sale company. For Carol (center), the “wow factor” is everything. Photo by Jan Sutherland.
The staff of Carol’s Helping Hands, an Oregon estate sale company: Carol Jordan (center), her husband, Lorenzo (back row, left) and the girls.
Whether it’s lazily staple-gunned to a telephone pole or printed on a Signicade, spotting an estate sale sign is a joy among fresh snow and Bernie Sanders’ smile. They’re cheaper than overpriced thrift stores selling moth-eaten sweaters, yet still combatant of consumer waste. They’re the foremost legal circumstance in which the universal desire to walk into strangers’ houses and take their things is realized. While an active member in the sector of industries which rely on grief and rough times, the estate sale exists not to exploit, but to heal. At their core, the estate sale is as punk as consumerism comes.
Estate sales typically occur once a homeowner joins a retirement community, downsizes, or passes away; creating the homeowner or remaining family’s need to liquidate excess possessions in order to prepare the home for market. An individual’s entire life — not simply the Eddie Bauer vests and Easter decorations — is put on display. Fishing trophies, hobby books, and occasionally even wedding photos are showcased in an anonymous exhibit. Estate sales provide us the unique privilege to peer in on strangers’ lives. Or, as estate sale organizer Carol Jordan says, “It’s a license to come and snoop through someone’s house.” And of course, buy their teacups and vintage Popeye trinkets.
Carol, owner of Carol’s Helping Hands, has been organizing estate sales professionally since 2016, “a pretty long time,” she admits. “I love organizing with the girls,” Carol says, the girls being her friends of forty years. “We celebrate birthdays together, we play Bunco together. We live in the same neighborhood.” With a chipper personality, and busy being her preferred state, her love for the trade checks out. Working alongside her closest friends and husband of over fifty years isn’t a poor deal either. Her husband, Lorenzo, is Helping Hands’ signage expert.
However, the notion to launch an estate sale company wasn’t necessarily Carol’s own. Years ago while helping friends with a moving sale, she was repeatedly asked by customers if she’d help them sell their things. Initially, she declined. Her career having traversed many phases already — a mother of four, postal worker for two decades, and Italian restaurant owner alongside Lorenzo for nearly another — this garage sale was a friendly favor and nothing more. Then, “after about the fourth person that came, I decided maybe I could help them,” she recalls, “and seven years later, here I am.”
It hasn’t always been easy, of course. Having gone through a pandemic and battling rising consumer prices, Helping Hands has felt pressure recently. On average, her company organizes five sales per year. “When [the pandemic] was going on, we maybe did one or two [sales] a year,” Carol says. She feels the inflation pinch has negatively impacted her business as well, asking “are [customers] going to spend $50 on a lamp, or are they going to put $50 worth of gas in a car?” But, ever the optimist, she’s confident that business is picking up: not counting garage sales, Helping Hands has organized three estate sales this year.
Like pre-cooked hotdogs, estate sales don’t suddenly materialize, already packaged neatly for our benefit. Carol’s team spends a month sifting, researching values, and pricing to prepare for a sale that will last less than a week. After taking on a client, and the client taking on Carol — “It’s a two-way street. We decide and they decide” — they get to work picking through every item, from eight in the morning to five in the evening. Sifting through a lifetime of inventory, her staff is often surprised by what they find. “People will sell anything,” Carol says. Once, she placed $25 on a vase that turned out to be an urn. As for the ashes in the vase, Carol claims they all “thought it was just dirt.”
As they go through, her staff categorizes items to prepare for the final display. “We put the items that match together; one table will have all candles, the other might have books,” she explains. “We usually have the entire house to decorate.” Presentation, what Carol calls the “wow factor,” is everything. During the organization process, she insists the client not be present: “It’s just way, way too hard,” she says. Does any artist like to be watched as they create?
Then, they move on to pricing. Having years of experience, her team can recall the value of candles and local brands like their middle names. However, other items require homework. Additionally, she has to remain competitive with ecommerce. When they aren’t sure of an item’s value, Jordan and her husband scout out similar items on resale websites to determine a reasonable price. “Say something is on eBay for $100. We might price it for $55, because we know when people walk in they can pull up the same thing on their phones,” she explains. Once the inventory has been researched and priced accordingly, one final sweep is required before the sale.
Prior to her estate sales’ opening to the general public, specialty sellers are let loose to pick through the sale first. She has a list of people — most of whom she met through her prior sales — that may collect certain things or are resale vendors who are invited to the presale on a rotation. This gives vendors the opportunity to get first pick at buying things for cheaper prices so they turn a profit after reselling them. Who gets called in for the presale is dependent on what the homeowner had an abundance of. “When I see what we have at the sale, say I have a lot of jewelry, I’ll call two or three people that do jewelry,” she explains. Her company is hired to move belongings out of a home, not to “put it online and try to make that extra dollar.”
Carol’s work has an impact beyond allowing the consumer to buy a vintage plate for cheaper than it would have been on eBay. Since estate sales happen because a house filled with belongings is left behind, usually a grieving family is involved. Going through a house filled with the pieces of your loved one’s entire life is challenging — especially while having a plethora of other responsibilities. “[The families have] lives, you know. The family members that are left either have jobs or children, and so they just don’t have the time or the energy to do it,” Carol says. During a time that can be incredibly stressful and trying, Carol is able to take some of the weight off the family’s shoulders by organizing their estate sale. To Carol, the help she provides is one of the most important parts of her job. She states,“We just started wanting to help people, especially seniors.”
Over the years, Carol has made lasting friendships with her clients and visitors. Helping Hands has connected with vendors, collectors, neighbors, and those just looking to pass the time. “They really need nothing, and I can tell that,” she says of customers who visit purely for the joy of her staff’s company. “To me, that’s the best part. They just want to talk.” Speaking with Carol, it’s no surprise why strangers want to stick around. With kind words and a sympathetic ear, she’s reminiscent of the personality you’d seek from a close mentor, or bartender. “I’ve always felt good about people,” she says.
Her feeling towards theft reinforces this. Carol feels she’s always been trusting, a helpful trait in her work. “If someone walks out with something, they need it more than we needed to sell it … that’s just the nature of some people.” Although she keeps valuable items within view, she feels that watching over visitors contradicts the carefree experience she hopes to create.
Trust between herself and the client is essential as well. “When we meet them, we’re strangers to them,” she explains. “They’re giving us the keys to their home, or their parents’ home.” Occasionally during the organization process, her staff will stumble upon important family artifacts or money. “We found hundreds of dollars in a handbag,” she recalls. “[We have to let the client] know we’re not there to take advantage of them. We’re here to help them.” Carol encourages the homeowners or remaining family to look over the inventory thoroughly, and reach out to extended loved ones to avoid selling anything of sentimental value.“We don’t want them to have regrets,” she explains.
Carol recognizes that her livelihood, working alongside her closest loved ones and making a tangible difference by helping soon-friends, is good fortune. “The money’s there to be made,” she says. “It’s a lot of work, but we make it fun.”
An estate sale is really a roll of the dice. You could be wandering the halls of a home you would otherwise only have the fantasy of burglarizing, or find yourself rummaging through yellowed sheet music while the seller makes colorful small talk about the pictured singer’s promiscuity: “What a rake!” Saturday mornings spent goose-chasing promising signs may turn to disappointing pre-afternoons of falsely advertised garage sales. But if you’re lucky, the signs aren’t only posted because the seller neglected to take them down. Like the sunrise in Vegas, the losses of yesterday can’t restrain your high hopes for the next sunny weekend — when Lake Oswego manors surely wait to be picked through.
