EstateSales.NET Blog

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As you know, EstateSales.NET is going through a series of updates. After all, we’re always looking for ways to better the way you interact with our site. Phase one had some subtle changes aimed at making it easier to find sales or companies within a specific city or metro area. Phase two will be a bit more obvious. Our goal is to make it easier to find sales in your area. So we’re prompting you up front to search by city or ZIP code. Though the map is no longer front-and-center, you still have the option of searching by state, and you can still easily search for specific items, if that’s how you prefer to use our site. In fact, finding specific items is about to become even easier! When you are looking through sales in a metro area, you will have the option of performing a keyword search within that area. So if you’re looking for an Arne Jacobsen egg chair, you can search the entire site, or you can limit your search to a specific radius...

At EstateSales.NET, it’s our goal to connect you with estate sales that interest you specifically. We’re always looking for new ways to improve our site and the way you interact with it, so in the coming months, you might see some changes. “But wait,” you might be saying. “EstateSales.NET already works for me. Why fix something if it isn’t broken?” As a website that lists estate sales across the United States, we need to make sure every visitor can easily access the sales on our site. Due to the difference in the volume of sales between geographical areas, we are making an effort to make EstateSales.NET better for everyone. For this first phase, we’re updating the header and improving the search function so you can more easily find sales or companies within a specific city or metro area. This will be particularly helpful for users in densely-populated areas. This new search bar will allow you to focus your search as you go. You can easily choose to search for companies and estate sales in your area...

The internet is amazing. The world’s knowledge is right at your fingertips. If you need to know how to change a tire, clean out your dryer ducts, or properly brine a turkey, there’s probably a video tutorial about it. There are people ready to weigh in with their “life hacks” to make mundane household chores easier or cheaper. Sometimes they’re great ideas. Other times, not so much. When we found some tarnished-to-high-heaven silver-plated dishes at a recent estate sale, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to test out some different methods of sprucing them up. Do a quick search, and you’ll going to find all sorts of articles about how to best clean your silver. And, here’s another one! We’ve tested out several home remedies for tarnished silver that the internet suggests, to see if they actually work. Turns out, sometimes things you read on the Internet aren't true. I believe it was Joan of Arc who originally said that...

This has been an exciting year at EstateSales.NET—a year of growth, change, and great estate sale finds! So as 2018 comes to a close, we wish all of you have a Merry Christmas, and we hope you find just what you're looking for in the new year. Searching For a Company Looking for a company to conduct your sale? Go to our Hire a Company page to find a company in your area. Find a Company Get Notified Sign up to receive free email notifications of estate sales in your area! Subscribe Now...

The holidays are well underway, which it means it’s time for the most delicious of traditions: cookies! For generations, families have gathered in kitchens every December to bake together. It’s a custom I share with my daughter—one I shared with my mother, and she with hers. It’s magical, precious, and extremely exhausting. But while the ritual has remained the same, the recipes certainly have changed—at least in my house. My daughter sends me links to recipe videos on Instagram showing cookies and cakes baked in a literal snap through the magic of video editing. She advocates for “unicorn poop” cookies she saw on YouTube alongside our traditional hand-cut and sprinkled sugar cookies and snickerdoodles. But many of the treats my mother made, and even more my grandmother made, are absent from our kitchen and from the snack trays and cookie swaps I have been privy to over the last several decades...

I brought a collection of slides into the office. The young people in the office didn’t know what they were. Ouch, right? Darn youths. Slides were the way my family held onto photographs when I was growing up. My parents had boxes of carousels in their closet, collecting dust after being viewed once (or maybe twice, if we had guests over after a family vacation, where they would be shown a slideshow of all our adventures). But as slide popularity died out, it was replaced by new-fangled digital media. My parents converted all of theirs to CDs, and then emptied their closets of all those carousels. And they aren’t the only people who have moved on from projecting images on a bedsheet hung over their TV. Which means that across the country, you can find these nuggets of personal and photographic history at estate sales. But what can you do with them? Sure you could dust them off and host a screening party of someone else’s vacation at your house, but then what? Lampshades! That’s what...

Halloween is around the corner. And as quickly as the holiday aisles at the big-box stores filled with costumes, they will empty, leaving you and your children with slim pickins (which is, coincidentally, the name of the off-brand Woody from Toy Story costume you might end up with if you don’t move fast). And heaven help you if you’re an adult woman. Every contemporary costume made for us involved short shirts and low necklines. (You can’t be a firefighter or a can of Diet Coke without decolletage, ladies!) So, the way I see it, you have three choices: Get to the Halloween stores ASAP and pay premium prices so your kid can be one of 300 Captain Marvels on the block. Wait until the Halloween aisles empty out and all that’s left are generic costume pieces like monster makeup, crowns, and wings, and convince your child that Prince or Princess FrankenFairy is totally awesome and not a shonky costume made entirely of leftovers. Find a one-of-a-kind costume that suits all your needs at your local estate sales and auctions (recommended)...

When I was a kid (and, I suspect, still) my church would raffle off a quilt every month. Tickets were $2 a piece, or 3 for $5. Every month, I would enter. After all, who can resist the siren song of gambling with someone else’s money? (Thanks, Grandma.) Every month, I didn’t win. But I never lost my appreciation for quilting. Not in an I-want-to-learn-how-to-do-that sort of way, though. Just in an I-want-one way. And now I own several (#blessed). The first quilt I acquired was one of those coveted church quilts, given to me by my grandmother as a wedding gift. A few were sewn and hand-tied by my husband’s great-grandmother. One was a memory quilt made out of my father-in-law’s t-shirts after he passed away. My most recent acquisition was one made by yet another in-law, who sews patches into the shape of an elephant or a donkey into a quilt, depending on the recipient’s political leanings. And every time I attend an estate sale, I struggle to convince myself that I have room to add to my collection. Quilting is beautiful in so many ways...

What child of the eighties didn’t covet a Cabbage Patch Kid ? I had one—a boy named Sheldon Percy, with brown, curly hair, and a green football jersey. My sister was blessed with two: a girl and a preemie. And now, 30 years later, she can’t remember either of her Cabbage Patch Kids’ names. Who was the better parent, I ask you? The Kids are gone now. I assume they’re all living happy, healthy lives. But do they call to check in? No. Of course not. Not even on Christmas. Not even to say hello. Where did we go wrong? Cabbage Patch Parenting is hard. Vintage Kids are still sought out by collectors. Doll aficionados, children of the 80s with fond memories of Christmas morning, parents of the 80s with stories to tell about the time they got into fisticuffs at Child World—the Cabbage Patch adopts out to all of them. But if you’re looking to start a collection, or maybe just find yourself drawn to one at an estate sale, it’s important to know what you’re looking at, so you know if you’re about to get a good deal...