What It’s Really Like to Pick a House

Objects like this carry the quiet history of the homes they came from.

It’s been almost a week since I spent more than six hours picking through a house in Alexandria, and I’m still working to inventory and display everything in the shop.

A mutual connection arranged the opportunity to help someone clean out their parents’ home. These kinds of estate clean-outs only happen a few times a year for me, and every time they do, I’m reminded how much trust is involved.

Most people assume the job is just about sorting through old things.

It’s not.

When you spend a full day inside someone’s family home, you start to see the story of how people lived. You can tell who loved to entertain. You notice the places they traveled when they were in foreign service. Sometimes the person helping me will point to a window or a bedroom and laugh about sneaking out as a teenager.

The objects in the house start to make more sense once you hear the stories behind them.

In most cases, what families want more than anything is simple. They want to know that the things their parents touched and used and cared about will end up somewhere they’re appreciated again.

That’s where a shop like Urban Redeux comes in.

At the most basic level, yes, we are a vintage resale shop. But at heart we are really stewards of the past. Our job is to make sure these pieces don’t disappear into a landfill or a storage unit. Instead, they get a second life in someone else’s home.

Some of the best finds come from these situations.

At one private sale I went back more than five times. Each trip I left with a car completely full. The owner was a retired police officer whose parents had run estate sales themselves. By the end of the week we were swapping stories, and when I left he handed me his old police flashlight.

He called it his “weapon of opportunity.”

It was one of those heavy old flashlights that could probably survive anything. I laughed when he said it, but I kept it. Not just because it’s a great vintage piece, but because now it carries his story too.

That’s the part of this business people don’t always see.

Behind almost every vintage object is a person, a memory, or a moment in someone’s life. When those things make their way into the shop, they bring those stories with them.

And when they go home with someone new, the story continues.