A couple of months ago we moved my grandma Jan into an assisted living facility – its a great place, but much smaller than her current house. Now many of you know my grandma loved to collect antiques and she and my grandpa collected for over 50 years. Her house (which we are also selling) is just over 5000 square feet and it was filled to the brim with collectibles.

My parents decided we needed to have an estate sale and they looked into the services that would do this for you and realized “Hey maybe we can do it ourselves.” My mom jumped in and began collecting helpers – Uncle Greg, Cousin Ben, Aunt Debbie, even Mark and Josh and I were up for a long weekend. She also found a couple of key helpers – Sue D (an avid collecter/artist), Sue M. and Helen (works for a local estate sale company). My mom and dad spent the whole summer weeding out, organizing, researching and displaying most of my grandma’s collection (don’t worry my grandma made sure to note down her favorite and most prized possesions which we family was able to keep – I am the new proud owner of some japanese china and Josh and Amy have a new player piano!!)

I headed up to Montana last wednesday to help with the actual sale which was to run thursday 4-7, Friday 9-3 and Saturday 9-3. I brought with me some orange aprons that I fabric dyed to match my mom’s keen shoes for all the workers. We had 18 workers total and quite a system.

Here we are kicking off the sale with a collection of old bells. Here you see me, helen, annette (she is my dad’s cousin), Ben, and Sue D. We got a lot of advice from Sue M. on how to run the sale including getting an armed security guard to make sure collectibles weren’t pocketed. Many of our workers would collect items from shoppers and then deliver them to the cashiers (Me, Mom and Shelley) until they wanted to check out. Every room in the house was filled with stuff.

We ran the ad starting thursday – so no early notice, and by 3:00 people were lining the street to come in – our line wrapped around the block. The Richau name is definitely known around Billings in the antique community.


Here are the aprons after day one. 🙂

Day one and two we held firm on prices and then on day three we had a very difficult system – all items under $10 were 50% off and anything over was 20% off unless marked firm or if it had a blue stamp on it. Whew – we were flustered all day!

Here’s dad after loading up some good…

And Ben with ayden bringing one of grandma’s carts around.

Greg loading up some gothic windows

I took some pictures to give you a flavor of the rooms – they were packed!!








Well now for the best part… how much did we make. For three day’s of sales we made just over $25,000. We even had a few people ask for our business cards – they thought we were a professional business. 🙂 It was a hard weekend because this really was my grandparents life – but we were so happy to see how the treasures that we have grown up attributing to my grandparents found great homes
with people who will also treasure them.

Watching the antique road show will never be the same!