Your Local Treasure Trove

Fine china, grandfather clocks, unique paintings and antique toys are just a few of the things you might find at in Fox Point.

The estate-sale and consignment store is almost bursting at the seams with pre-owned treasures – treasures that could literally take hours to sift through.

“I can’t even guess how many items we have,” said owner, Barb Wade. "Probably hundreds of thousands."

Shoppers weave through tight pathways of dining-room tables piled high with dishes, lamps, statues, and a menagerie of other items, each with a hand-written price tag accompanied by a product number.

Wade said the business sends out between 650 and 800 consignment checks a month. But with something new on the shelves everyday, Wade saw it fit to turn an old garage connected to the rear of the building into a heated, and air-conditioned, addition.

“This building is a garden and landscaping business that we’re leasing from, and they’ve been here for 75 years,” explained Wade.  “We started small and only had a little part of this building.  Then we grew to another part, and another part, and now we lease the whole building.  Now we’re opening up a whole new room.”

The new room, scheduled to open April 1, looks nearly half the size of the original space, totaling the square footage of the showroom at almost 7,000 square feet.

But the real show-stopper at Legacies is what’s inside.  Between the unsold items from one of their weekly estate sales and consignment items from customers, the new room is definitely needed.  However, with so many antiques and unusual items, determining the price for each product involves a lot of work.

“We do the research to determine the price per item, and we use a lot of different resources,” said Wade.  “Of course we use the internet, but we also use our reference library and different contacts that we’ve made.  We’ve been in business since 1992, so we have plenty of references.”

Legacies also uses those contacts to provide an appraisal service.  Customers with unique items can come into the store and find out how much their worth, much like a permanent Antiques Roadshow.

Some of the contacts Wade and her eight employees call on to price out certain things are the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Milwaukee County Historical Society, the American Doll Association or the Quilting Association.

Doing the research comes at a price, though.  Legacies takes one-third of the sale price as commission for determining the correct price and selling it.  For estate sales, commission is one-third of the total sale.

But when it comes to estate sales, many times it involves a loved one passing away and leaving a house-full of memories for relatives or friends to handle.

“It’s such a good service for them because sometimes you’re just overwhelmed," Wade said. "You want to trust a company who can take a bit of the pressure off of you.  And to liquidate the content with all of the years of accumulation, it can be incredibly overwhelming for some people, especially if the relatives live out of state.”

Legacies encourages relatives to go through the house and take what they’d like before getting to work.  Because of their large showroom, anything with obvious value that isn’t sold at the estate sales is again put up for sale at the store.

Sometimes, however, estate sales aren’t associated with someone passing away.  Wade explained many times where clients have to move out of the country for their job and decide to sell everything.  Or parents whose children are all moved out and would like to simplify.

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s so fun,” said Wade.  “You have to clean basements.  You have to clean attics.  You have to clean garages.  But at the same time, it’s such a great service, and I learn something new every day.” 

And for every estate sale, Wade has a little ritual of her own.

“I’m kind of at that age where I’m downsizing myself, but I always buy one thing from each one of the estate sales,” Wade said. 

“It’s like my diary.  I try to pick something that reminds me of that sale.  For example, we had an estate sale where this woman collected dolls – she had thousands.  So, to remind me of her sale, I bought a doll.”