In mid-July of 2020, a longtime colleague and attorney called us regarding his client who needed to clear her family home of 30 years. She was moving into a retirement community in Missouri to be closer to her family and needed to scale down her possessions. Her plan was to ship a lot of art to various family members, sell and donate such as possible, recycle and leave the house ‘broom clean’ so it could be sold. Nothing terribly unusual about it other than it was happening during a pandemic. As details unfolded, we learned that his client, Doris, had gone to visit family in St Louis and made the decision not to return to New York. Doris is 103 years young and completely in charge of her life. Her nephew helped coordinate the effort despite his being in the midst of his own move. He sent us photos of Doris at age 23 (gorgeous and fashionable) and another at age 98 playing golf with a perfect and powerful swing. He told us of the wonderful life she had as an interior decorator and artist. That did it! Doris became our new idol.
Movie star 
Killer swing
Our challenge was to sort through 3 floors, a basement, attic and a garage. Throughout the process, we connected with Doris and her nephew by phone, text, photos, Email to determine what Doris wanted to do with her treasures of many years. This can get tricky long distance. Over our 32 years of business, we’ve learned how to do this without the client’s being able to point things out to us in person. Armed with laptops and the newly discovered Zoom technology, we arranged to have a virtual tour with her nephew. It was a good plan, but spotty wi-fi spoiled our efforts. That’s OK, the nature of our business demands that we always have a Plan B, so we took loads of photos, organized them by room, and shared them in the cloud.
Up to that point we had communicated only with the attorney, real estate broker and her nephew, so the time came to speak with Doris herself. We were prepared to speak slowly, loudly and repeat things a few times. Our notions of what it would be like to speak with a 103-year-old woman long distance were completely shattered within 30 seconds of our first phone call. Doris is delightful; thoroughly engaging, funny, and to top it off, knew the location of every single item she owned. We had to struggle to keep up with her!
With her excellent memory and guidance, she directed which items (including a considerable art collection) she wanted moved into her new home in Missouri, and which she wanted sent to family members. She asked us to sell or donate as much as possible and then empty and ‘broom clean’ the large house so it could be sold. We arranged for the moving company to send shipments to 5 recipients, in 3 different states and then sold, donated, and disposed of the rest. She was thrilled.
We spoke to Doris recently to see how she was settling into her new apartment. She thanked us again and again for taking on this enormous project and following up on all the details. “You girls did a wonderful job”, she said, New York accent fully intact, “a couple of things got bumped, but whatta ya gonna do?”. “Tell me, what’s going on in New York? I get the New York Times, but what’s it like now in the city? This is a beautiful place where I am now, but I’m getting a little stir crazy here with the quarantining.” You can take the girl outta New York…
