Slim Pickins

Today we went on a pick with a guy we know from the auction house. It is a condemned house that is due to be torn down in several days. It was the most smelly, moldy, dirty, horrible place I've been. It was disgusting. Now I know how the houses on the show "Hoarders" must smell and look. Piles of moldy crap everywhere. The roof leaked, the plumbing leaked, there was no electricity and it was nearly 90 degrees out and HUMID AS FUCK.

You'd dig, and every once in awhile something that looked like it must have been owned by a human once would pop out of a pile. I crawled over plastic grocery bags full of old, rotting trash to dig through the kitchen cabinets and scraped up a large pile of Visions cookware, a teapot with a forget-me-not motif, a mod ashtray, and a Pyrex Butterprint bowl. I sang "Booty Wurk" to myself the entire time...lol.

Upstairs, I dug under overturned bureau drawers and an old mattress to find some old purses and a 1940's sheer nightgown...it's badly stained and might not be salvageable, but I'll boil it in some oxi. Same room also got a vintage hawaiian shirt and an old polyester pink gingham "Annette Funicello" type bikini top, as well as a wicker purse marked "Hawaii". In another room, Charley unearthed an old doll, and I found a weird kitschy old skirt and a tablecloth. Downstairs there was a tattered piece of barkcloth tossed over an old sewing machine and then piled up with old moldy magazines. I chopped the bastard apart in order to remove it, but parts of it will be able to be used in some sort of project. I was not going to leave it behind. I crawled across a grody pile of wet paper insulation to dig through a closet where I found two tooled leather belts in good shape.

There was so much crap around each piece of furniture that you could not remove it even if you wanted to, which was a shame, because there was a hoosier cabinet, 2 formica and chrome tables with at least 6 matching aqua chairs (they actually were in good shape, but I cannot imagine how long it will take for the mold smell to dissipate), 2 beautiful delicate wrought iron beds, a suite of waterfall furniture (bed was shot, rest look salvageable), and an art deco Lane cedar chest. If it had been my own pick...I'd have gotten me some thick rubber gloves and started chucking the small in-the-way shit out the back windows so the town would not see, and dragged that damned furniture out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-VnjtQhKc0