Welcome to garage sales Unhinged.
Where the characters are as quirky as the vines.
I'm Julie. And I'm Jake.
Join us as we dive into the wild world of garage sales, yard
sales, estate sales, and anywhere secondhand sales are
happening from. Bizarre bargains to hilarious
haggles. You won't believe the stories
we've got lined up. Let's get unhinged.
So the the neighborhood Julie I live in, the median age around
here is got to be like 65. Hot.
Yeah, that's. Sexy is all good out.
That's right man, all the casserole you could want.
All the hard candy. Oh baby, there you go.
A lot of lap sitting and truth is like most of the home walk
the dogs all the time right? Yep.
And thing I I tend to do, walking the dogs is like, hey,
let me count how many houses are for sale or are clearly not
inhabited. OK.
And there's a lot, I mean, like for one, yeah, that's the
housing market right now. I get it.
But even before the market kind of took it the nose dive that
it's been in, there's a lot of houses that have been empty
because, you know, the the prior resident recently passed away
and the house is either in probate or something like that
and it's just empty. It's kind of.
So, OK, hold, I'm going to pause you right there.
I follow this guy on the socials where he goes in and he will cut
people's lawns whenever their grass gets too high and he does
it for free. And part of it, it's just an
ASMR video because I'm like, oh, look at those clean lines.
Look at it like it's all getting trimmed.
I don't know, but a lot of the properties he goes and he tries
to talk to the homeowner to say like, hey, is this OK?
But some of the properties he goes to, no one lives there.
It hasn't been inhabited because a lot of the houses are in
probate and the family may live out of state or something like
that. So no one's actually taking care
of the house or the the yard. And I was like, yeah, that, that
is a hard conundrum to be in because I'm sure they're also
getting letter. Well, I'll, I'm saying for sure,
I'm sure the city wants to send a letter to the homeowner saying
you need to cut your yard or something like that, but then
it's stuck in probate, So what do you do?
Yeah, whose responsibility is that?
I'm curious about this guy you're talking about that lawn
bombs people. He's saying he does this for
free, but it also sounds like he does this for passive
aggressiveness. Like it's just people.
Tell them your yard's out of order, ma'am.
He'll just go and cut it and be like, isn't that better?
And you know what it is? So he, he does it one day out of
the week. So he owns a, a lawn company.
He, he actually gets paid to do people's yards.
But one day out of the week he will go to someone's, he'll go
to a property that needs to be cut.
And a lot of times he is, I don't want to say that he is
looking, but he's looking for like maybe it's single moms or
older people. Or houses.
Or houses that are in probate, something of like this is A1
house in a neighborhood that's just not being taken care of.
And how can he help out that neighborhood?
But he also has kids. And so he gets his kids involved
in the lawn company. Now here's the thing, even
though he doesn't charge them for this thing, he records the
whole process and he makes money off of so yeah.
Yeah. So only, you know, I'm not going
to yuck someone's Yum. And also I like to watch the
videos. All right, Well, that's the
situation around here. A lot of houses that you presume
are in probate, they're, you know, not really.
I mean, it's not that they're going into disrepair or anything
like that, but there's some, some of them do have to lock
boxes on the front door. There's clearly not a lot of
activity there. So, and it's months on end.
So you go like, well, no one, no one lives there.
One of those situations is right next to me.
OK. And I'm this is a story in three
parts. OK.
Part 1 This story about a property in this situation that
is immediately adjacent to mine. We actually share a fence.
Part 1 is called Memento Mori. OK, memento what?
Memento Mori. OK.
And you've made light of my Latin studies before, but I know
what that means. Yeah, I don't know what it
means. OK, it's a reminder of death.
Oh, that's very dark, Yeah. So Part 1, walking the dogs and
the, you know, there's a lot of old folks in the neighborhood
and they love the dogs. Oh, they love to pet the dogs
and everything like that. A lot of them give them treats
and the dogs are kind of addicted to it and it's kind of
a problem sometimes. But right next door, I've only
seen her since like the, you know, the three or so years here
maybe 3 Times Now, you know, working in her kind of some of
the some of the garden up front, some of the landscaping, kind of
trimming a Bush or something like that tiny little old lady.
I mean like a wisp of a person and one of these times and I
feel like way there, you know, acknowledge high and nothing,
nothing. And that's OK because some
people are like, Hey, you know, like I'm, I'm, I'm anxious or
something cool one time. Hold on.
The way you said a sounded like the Fonz from.
I'm just here to trim your yard. You know you're a single old
lady, right? And you know it.
And those little old ladies would go all after him.
There you go. One time she was trying to pull
her trash can back toward the house and clearly struggling
with it. I had these dogs on the leash
and I was offering to help. I was like, do you need help?
And she was, it was clear that she had a hard time either
hearing me or understanding me or just like didn't want me to
even engage. Eventually I was like, you know,
this is probably scary for her. I'm just going to disengage and
continue. And hope to God she gets this
thing up the street and is OK. Fast forward a little bit months
later. Hadn't seen the lady in a while.
Turns out she had passed away. Very sad.
Yeah, very sad. Can I?
OK, Hopefully she had a good life, a great life, and death
isn't really like. It's not the end.
Yeah, with Hellraiser has made that point many times.
But can I just flip it around? Like would it be more sad if she
had turned into a zombie? Go on.
I mean like at the end of your life you're like you.
Just struggle with the trash can, you know?
Yeah, it's like, oh, you know, at the end of your life, like,
OK, now I get to rest. I, you know, I'm, I'm done.
And then it's like, oh, you know, it's really sad.
She turned into a zombie and now she's just always hungry for
brains. Like, I think, you know, put
into perspective people. So that happens.
And even before then, like part of the fence that we share, you
know, across the yard, really bad shape.
I mean like really bad shape. This fence is like really
leaning, threatening to fall down and I don't want to, you
know, go over there and knock on her door and talk about the
fence and hey, how can we take care of this thing?
Because I don't want it to fall down and dogs get out and all
the other stuff. But at the same time, I'm
worried if I knock on the door, she will like crumble into a
pile of dust. I don't want to do that.
So I just kind of let it flies like I'll figure it out and I've
tried to jury rig it on my side, but it's the problems on the
other side. And so like, well man, well,
maybe eventually somebody will be by the house to take care of
the estate so I can actually have this conversation.
Time goes by and nobody's there. What the heck?
One time I'm going by and I see a truck, 2 trucks at the out
like finally let me go do this. I'm going to go take care of
this, walk over there and talk to at first the yard guys, the
yard guys explain what's going on.
Yep, the lady had passed away, this and that.
We're contracted to take care of the yard.
Oh, OK, cool. Well, I have to think about the
fence. That's really not us.
That's the management company. And there's this piece of paper
on the door that's got a number you can call.
All right, cool. I do that, I call up and the
management company answers and says, OK, we're going to be out
there on this day, let's look at it then.
Yes, great day comes. I go out there, those folks are
there. They're inside the house
clearing out. Like the house is still full of
stuff, obviously. And they were really nice.
They actually were like, hey, yeah, come on in.
OK so I go in Part 2 is what happened inside the house.
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make your next sell at success. The investigation.
OK, Do do we need to have like one of the courtroom dolls of
like, where did they touch you? Right, right, right, right.
So go inside this house and it's still completely furnished.
Turns out the lady, her husband had passed, you know, some
10/15/20 years earlier. She'd been living there alone,
you know, the entire time. No surviving family.
OK. None.
No children, no siblings, clearly no parents, but so the
house. I don't, I don't know.
I want to say the word arrears because it makes me laugh every
time I say it, but I don't know if that term applies here or
not. But there's no real, I mean part
of the to figure out what. Why does a rears make you laugh?
He's got rears, rears. It's a butt joke.
It's the butt of the joke.
A joke of the butt. But probate is meant to figure
out, well, OK, who who's all this stuff go to?
Who's responsible for the stuff? And one thing I've learned is
about something called intestacy laws in the state.
When there's no widower, there's no kids, there's no relatives,
what happens? Does it go to the neighbor
right? That'd be proud of school.
As long as there's no fence separating the progress.
I don't know, they're kicking it down, but so that was the
situation. The House was paid for,
obviously, she'd been there forever.
But there's no one for it to go to.
There's no money owed on the thing other than the paltry
taxes, you know, overtime. It doesn't at at that point, you
belong to a management company that was just managing it while
they're sorting out who this goes to.
So here's everything at stake here, OK?
OK. House full of furniture and
because they've been there so long, the furniture, you know,
it's, it's not the most modern stuff, but it kind of I'd say
the furniture is, you know, sixties, 70's, the stuff in the
house that's not furniture, you know, as it is like people
collect stuff that spends their time on this earth.
So there's stuff in there that is like way old.
Her husband was clearly a veteran of some sort.
They have all of this like an armoire fool of actual China,
actual crystal like, and to the point that like, I only knew
that because the lady that was there helping sort out stuff.
It's like, look, grabs a piece, thumps, it does that whole
thing. The wing things like, isn't that
neat? All of this is like that.
Yeah, that's neat. Leaded stained glass windows all
over the place. Oh my, yeah.
Antique dishes, vintage stuff. I mean, it was like a like a
crazy bonanza of things. Those folks were in there.
They're like, Oh yeah, we're going to take this, this, this
and this because I something between either the bank or the
lawyer or something. These things are going
someplace. But everything else, who knows.
If you want it, make an off. And it was like, I was kind of
like locked up. I was like, do you mind if I
look around and take some pictures?
Yeah, sure. What?
Did they even ask for your ID? No.
No, no. You could have been just, you
could have been, you know, some just guy driving through the
neighborhood and going, yeah, I think that looks like.
I, I simply was, I mean, I was, I walked over there, but I'm
it's disarming how handsome I am.
And so they were fine with. Hold on.
OK. So they were struggling with a
section of the house, a bathroom that had been converted into a
utility room. So it's got a washer and dryer
in what was clearly a walk in shower at some point.
And they're trying to figure out how to get the machines out of
there. And I pointed out to was like,
it's clear over here from the outside of this room.
The only way they got those things in there was that they
took the door frame out, put the machines in there, and then put
the door frame back. Oh my.
And they? Were like, well forget it, like
I'm not, I'm not messing with all that.
That's somebody else's problem. Yeah.
So they left a fully functioning, fairly new washer
and dryer set and a lot of other stuff.
I mean, this place was filled with appliances, furniture, art,
dishes and a garage full of stuff including a Cadillac.
Like how old is this Cadillac? You know, early 90s, yeah.
It wasn't a Fish Tale. You know, Sweden that that would
have been a different story. But all of this stuff, and
they're just like, Yep, we'll figure out where this stuff goes
eventually. But if you want it, you can make
an offer, I guess. I didn't do any of that, though.
There was a lot of cool stuff, but time goes on and I'm walking
the dog still because we pass by there all the time on the route
and the grass, it's higher and higher and higher and higher.
At some point there's a bad storm in the area and actually
knocked off a big chunk of a tree in the yard and like it
falls into the street. Didn't damage the house, didn't
damage any wires or anything like that, but it's a, a good
chunk of the tree that's in like, you know, 1/4 of the
street. And I'm calling the number on
the paper going, hey, here's the thing, here's what happened.
Can we, what's up? And by the way, this fence, like
I, I still have my problems, you know, like and so, but at some
point the person answering the phone goes, Oh, we don't, that's
not in our books anymore. So where?
Who owns the house? So here's the thing before I get
to Part 3. Oh, OK.
The end of Part 2 in the investigation is that at some
point the House wasn't able. The investigation meaning just
what you know. Yes.
Oh, OK, yeah. That's good.
I, I, I walked the 30 feet more than once to go and look.
I, I never saved the number. So I had to go look at the
number a few times to call it, this is me and that I did a
little Googling and part of what I found out was that at some
point this house was in probate. Probate went, we got nothing.
There's nowhere for it to go. No one like the only person that
owned the title has passed. There's there's not a balance
due to the bank, so it doesn't belong to the bank and now the
house doesn't belong to anyone. Jake, have you thought about
going to court to say my sweet old neighbor said that I could
have the house? We connected over the trash can
thing. Yeah, yeah, it's.
Sweet, he left the house to my dogs.
That's right. Yeah.
And honestly, it is. It's got a lot of really cool
things to it. It's got a lot of damage to it,
too, but whatever. But right now, the house doesn't
belong to a bank. It doesn't belong to a person.
It doesn't belong to an estate. It doesn't belong to anybody.
It's in limbo and this was happening like, you know, here
just like right now. So I'm not sure if it's
something supposed to be happening to it or not, but I'm
really not sure how the law works in this situation.
I, I don't know if you or anybody listening has a point of
view on this, but when the house has no and when property has no
antecedent, you know, when it doesn't go to anybody, there's
nobody for whom to it to go to, you know, is it anybody's
property? I mean, if there's no will, I
would and it, you know, the bank doesn't own it.
No, I feel like it would go back to like the county because at
some point the property taxes are not going to be paid.
Right. And then I would imagine the
county would be able to put a lien or foreclosure on it and
then potentially bank would come in and or you know, an investor
or somebody would come in and buy it.
What about all those stuff? What about the Cadillac?
I mean, you buy it as is. So like whatever is there, they
get. And here's the thing, like part
of it is, and I'm assuming this folks, I have no clue.
I'm just assuming because that's what I do, Like if the county
goes to take ownership of it, they may like have somebody come
in and clean it out and then that stuff would go to like a
county auction or city auction or something like that.
That's what the initial management company had
mentioned. Like that's what they were, they
were there to do. But now they're telling me like
they wash their hands of it. They're like, not us.
And well, the city, they're like, not us.
So that takes me to Part 3. You should call the county.
No. Oh.
OK. I don't have the county on speed
dial. You just said how you googled
things. Oh.
Yeah. How cold is it your story?
So Part 3 of the story is one that will maybe cover on a later
episode. And it's the gift because I was
like, I, the curiosity got the best of me and I, I, I got you a
gift. From The Zombie Lady.
No. Oh.
How rude of you I. Mean what?
Where'd you get my gift from? Who's?
To say at this point I mean you. You got it.
You. Did it?
You, you got it, so you should be the person to say.
So when we do get to our our fabulous holiday episode where
we exchange gifts, no that I didn't have to go far to find
yours. Did you go 30 feet?
Up there about. Is it a washer and dryer that
you had to? Take before it's a washer and
dryer in the back of a Cadillac. Honestly, this sounds great.
My price is right, dreams are coming true.
So yeah, no, it's, it was just kind of a unique situation as
far as property and what happens to it.
And like things, you know, when things are out of your hands,
the stuff you leave behind does go into some sort of a secondary
market, whether you have clear directions on how it does so or
not. But here was a situation where
there was no clear direction and there's no clear executor, yeah,
no clear antecedent to receive the property.
Yeah. It's also this is a good call to
our listeners of please do a will make sure that you get that
thing filed with the right legal entities so that your neighbor,
you know, this neighbor of yours didn't have living family or
anything like that. But also now as your neighbor,
you get to live through the ramifications of no one taking
ownership of any of this stuff. Yeah, I will say here recently
the the place did get mowed and somebody did come and chop up
the giant branch that fell. What about the fence?
No, no, no dice there. Well, one issue is that their
side of the fence is just like completely overrun with vines
and thorns. So I'm, I'm waiting until like
now, like it get cold like this, I'm going to go over there and
take care of it and patch it up. The patch up job is going to be
on that side. I don't got to look at it, but
the fence is not going to fall down.
So but mysterious interloper, probably this, this passive
aggressive hunk that you're talking about, went over there
and took care of the yard and like got some content out of it.
And right now, it's not as much of an eyesore, you know, for
this neighborhood, for what that's worth.
But godspeed, little old lady. You seemed really cool.
Your house is very nice. Don't eat my brains.
Yeah. If we lived in a world where
zombies are a real thing and it's like, oh, you know, Julie,
she passed. She lived a good life and she's
gone, that's one thing. The other thing is, like poor
Julie, she lived a good life and now she's a zombie and she's
just walking 20,000 steps a day dragging her left leg like no,
just let me die. Yeah, but but her.
But her strata app is still going.
She's really logging in those steps, keeping up with her,
still kind of reading the system.
When there's zombie walkers out there, you can't really keep up.
For all the people that are like doing the, the Wellness
challenges at work, you have to get so many steps.
Just imagine a zombie having a bunch of Apple Watches and
Fitbits and the the rings that you that track all your steps
and like just weighed down with all this technology and just
walking across America for help. Kind of kind of sounds like
you're drafting up a pretty good satire.
No, it's reality. But also pour one out for your
neighbor. Yes, so that that's what's up
mystery kind of solved. We'll see what happens.
Honestly, I from the way this whole thing looks, you could
probably buy the place for pennies on the dollar and who
knows if you'd be able to resell it, But if you could, it'd be,
I'm not going to say easy money, but because I don't want anybody
to like beat me to the punch, so.
Well, I look forward to Part 3. Yes, well, now.
I'm invested. I got to.
I got to know what happened. I'll probably forget they all
have build up from from this one when we get to that, but remind
me if if you remember it before I do.
OK, I don't mind. All right.
All right, see you later. Bye.