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The coronavirus pandemic has thrown everyone’s world upside down. A majority of businesses have shut down, school’s have closed, and many major cities have issued stay-at-home orders. The recent developments have affected us at Dakil Auctioneers, Inc., too. We’ve postponed our auctions until it’s safe for non-essential businesses to resume operations.
These unprecedented times have left you with more free time than you’ve likely ever experienced. You can only watch “Tiger King” on Netflix so many times and your DVR can only hold so many hours of television. While we encourage you to relax, stay healthy, and stay safe during this unnerving time, this also presents an opportunity to spring clean and organize your house.
We’ve provided some organizing tips while you quarantine and offered some solutions on how we may be able to help you offload any unwanted items.
Everyone has their own method of cleaning up. As a general rule of thumb, you can practice tidying, organizing, and minimizing.
When you organize, it’s helpful to separate items based on what you’ll do with them. You can create bins with things you’ll keep, donate, recycle, sell, or throw away.
This blog post uses a three-step organizing process of edit, contain, and label.
To start, edit your items by going through them to visually see what you have. This helps create a mental picture of what you need to organize.
In the contain process, decide what you want to keep and store those items away in containers. Make sure you use clear bins so you can easily view your things. You can put things away without organizing them, but that’s not the point, is it?
Using labels will help with future organizing. Skipping the final two steps can negate any strides you make, as you’re more likely to fall back into bad habits and clutter up your spaces again.
You likely have plenty of random items situated around your house that you never use or never knew you had. Your time at home quarantining is a perfect excuse to go through your clutter.
Professional organizer Marie Kondo has a way to declutter your house called the KonMari Method. Instead of going through items in each room, this method tackles five categories: clothes, books, papers, miscellaneous items, and sentimental items.
The process takes a willingness and commitment to organizing. Ask yourself if the items bring out joy, still serve a purpose, or if it’s sentimental. It’s safe to get rid of them if they no longer carry meaning or you don’t have plans to use them.
This is a more logical approach instead of arbitrarily throwing stuff into a trash can without much thought. You can also reflect back on items before discarding them as a way to mentally move on.
We compiled some of the most interesting items auctioned off in 2019 in case you need a refresher on how peculiar and obscure items can generate monetary interest. In one scenario, a California family stumbled upon a video game when they were cleaning and organizing their mother’s attic. The Nintendo game from 1988 sold for $9,000.
Once you’re done separating and organizing, take any items you set aside as collectibles and determine if they have value. You can bring them to a local appraiser or check the internet to get a better idea if you should sell them. You never know what you may have sitting around that could be worth something.
Depending on what you find, your items could garner interest at an auction. What makes a good auction item? Firearms, especially antique versions, are always popular items. Gold, diamonds, jewelry, and collections such as vintage coins or stamps always do well at consignment auctions. In fact, one of our top auctions from 2019 came from abandoned and unclaimed safety deposit boxes via the Oklahoma State Treasurer.
Some of the items auctioned off included gold, diamonds, coins, baseball cards, Native American pottery, watches, silverware, perfume bottles, and sports memorabilia.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends social distancing except for essential trips out in public, so we don’t recommend taking trips to your local bank to view the remnants of your safety deposit box. However, it’s worth accounting for any collectible items stored away that you forgot about.
Even bigger tools and machinery that have gone untouched in your garage can have value. We put on heavy equipment auctions several times a year. The items auctioned off range from workout equipment (treadmills and bicycles) to lawnmowers and chainsaws.
If none of your items has value, this is a good opportunity to donate them to a local charity, city mission, or Goodwill. Call ahead to make sure these organizations are open. With many businesses closed for the foreseeable future, you may be better off hanging onto your items and donating them at a later date once it’s safer to be out and about.
As an alternative, you can post items on Facebook’s Marketplace for free. Members of your community may have a use for them. Put any leftover items on your curb with a “free” sign. It may surprise you who could find a use for your items.
Whatever you do, follow proper cleaning and disinfecting guidelines for any items you get rid of. This is an easy way to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. The CDC has an in-depth guide on how to clean and disinfect various surfaces, electronics, and laundry.
You can contact our office at 405-751-6179 for more information on when our auctions will resume. Here’s a direct link to our upcoming auctions schedule page to see what’s next on the calendar. You can also subscribe to our newsletter to see the latest trends in the auction industry.
In the meantime, stay up to date on the coronavirus and COVID-19 outbreak via resources from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization. For Oklahoma residents, the Oklahoma State Health Department’s resource center provides statewide news and updates. You can also check out the OKC-County Health Department coronavirus page for any Oklahoma City mandates, business closures, and updates.
