Estate liquidation in Piedmont.

Sycamore handles estate liquidation and cleanouts in Piedmont, from valuation and online auctions to the final cleanout.

The housing stock is the reason these take longer

Piedmont was largely built out between about 1900 and 1940. The result is a city of substantial Tudor, Mediterranean and Colonial Revival houses, most of them on their original footprint, many with the original built-in storage intact.

That means full basements, floored attics, butler's pantries, linen cupboards, cedar closets and detached garages. Houses of that era and size hold several times what a comparable modern house holds, because they were designed around storage and because families stayed in them.

Practically, the estimate is set by those spaces rather than by the number of bedrooms. The attic and the basement are usually where the work is.

What tends to be in a house like that

Houses built for this kind of household came with full formal service: dinner services, sterling flatware, crystal, table linen, and case furniture built for rooms of that scale.

Anything of that kind needs identifying properly before it is listed. Sterling is weighed. Hand-knotted rugs are measured and identified rather than described as decorative. Jewelry, coins and fine art go to a specialist first.

Access and staging

Piedmont's streets are narrow, hilly and often winding, with limited on-street parking and very little commercial frontage anywhere in the city. There is nowhere to stage a job except the property itself.

• Truck position usually has to come from the driveway, which on a 1920s house is normally narrow and sometimes shared.
• Many houses sit above or below the street behind a run of steps.
• Detached garages at the back of a lot mean a long carry to the street.
• Because the city is small and residential throughout, work is scheduled to keep trucks off the street longer than necessary.

The rest of the job is the same

Valuation, cataloging, an online estate auction, buyer pickup in scheduled slots, then donation, recycling and removal of the remainder, with the property swept and photographed empty. The full sequence is on the Oakland estate liquidation page.

Common questions

Do you charge more because it is Piedmont?

No. The commission is a percentage of what the contents sell for and it does not change by city. Volume and access change the cleanout cost, and a large pre-war house with a full basement is more work than a small one anywhere.

Can you work around a sale closing?

Yes, if you tell us the date at the first conversation.

What about the papers and photographs?

Set aside for the family, always. Documents live in furniture, so a deliberate search happens before anything is moved. What to do with a house full of belongings covers what is worth looking for.