At a glance
- Where
- Charlotte, NC
- Pieces sold
- 7
- Median time to sell
- 4 days
- Client nets
- 85%
The situation
This was a retirement move — North Carolina to Florida, out of about 4,200 square feet and into a smaller, brighter house with a completely different look. They did not want the antiques. Decades of 1920s walnut bedroom furniture, a set of inlaid mahogany bookcases, a leather-top writing desk on wrought iron: good pieces, every one of them wrong for where they were going. This is precisely the moment furniture like that gets given away or hauled off, because big brown furniture has a reputation for being unsellable and nobody in the middle of a retirement move has the time to test the theory.
What we did
We inventoried the house room by room and photographed every piece where it stood, before anything was moved or emptied. Each one was priced against completed-sale comparables rather than wishful asking prices. Pieces that belonged together stayed together as lots instead of being split for a theoretical per-unit gain, and the whole group went up on our own storefront — with anything that suited a local buyer priced for one, since freight is what kills a furniture sale. Some pieces needed more than a listing. The lighted two-piece china hutch was enormously heavy, and it took four men and a truck to get it out of the house and into the buyer's. We handled all of it, from the pickup to the delivery, and both the family and the buyer were happy at the end of the day. A Japanese painted-silk screen went the other way: we collected it from the house and shipped it to a buyer in New York City who found it on eBay. The family never had to coordinate a mover, a carrier or a pickup window.
The outcome
The reputation is wrong: the antiques sold. The walnut bedroom group went in a single day, the mahogany bookcases and the leather-top desk shortly after, and then the pieces that looked hardest to move, the oversized hutch and a delicate silk screen, found buyers too, one across town and one across the country. They kept 85% of every sale, moved to Florida with the furniture they actually wanted, and paid nobody to haul away the furniture they did not.
We never publish a client's name or address. The photographs are our own catalog shots of the pieces themselves, taken while we inventoried. Every figure below is a real completed sale from our own ledger, linked to the item it belongs to.
I settled my own parents' estates in 2021 and did it badly — most of it ended up in a storage unit I paid for over the next several years. That's why we work this way. — Charles · Read the whole story →
