Lemay

One More Box in the Garage

When you're closing an estate, you don't always know what you're going to find until the house is nearly empty.

In our original Lemay Local Story, From Oregon to Missouri: One Less Estate Problem to Solve, we shared how MDRF helped a man from Oregon resolve his late brother's firearm collection during a limited visit to St. Louis.

We had spent several weeks communicating by email and text before he arrived in St. Louis, which allowed us to review the firearm collection and make much of the process predictable before he ever got on the plane.

But the firearms weren't the last discovery.

A late discovery during a Lemay estate cleanout, a storage tub of knives found beneath a workbench after the firearm collection had already been addressed.

While continuing to clean out his brother's property, he found a plastic storage tub tucked beneath a workbench in the garage. Inside was another collection, dozens of knives, sheaths, cases, and related items that hadn't been part of our original discussions.

The collection included knives from Benchmade, Buck, Frank Beltrame, A.G. Russell, Böker, and several custom knife makers, along with a variety of other fixed-blade and folding knives. Some were relatively ordinary production knives, while others deserved a closer look based on the maker, model, condition, and collectibility.

A closer look at the newly discovered collection, which included Benchmade, Buck, Frank Beltrame, A.G. Russell, Böker, custom-made knives, and other fixed-blade and folding knives.

Rather than leaving him to determine what was worth keeping, selling, or disposing of, we went through the newly discovered collection as another part of helping him finish the estate.

That's a situation we see more often than people might expect.

Collections aren't always neatly stored in one gun safe. Firearms may be in one room while knives, ammunition, scopes, magazines, reloading equipment, original boxes, paperwork, and other related property are scattered throughout a basement, garage, workshop, or closet.

For an executor or family member, especially one handling an estate from another state, the difficult part isn't always selling something. Sometimes it's simply determining what has been left behind, what may have value, and what is worth dealing with before the property is cleared.

In this Lemay estate, a tub discovered under a garage workbench became one more piece of the estate that needed an answer.

And one less thing his brother had to figure out before returning to Oregon.