Our Story

In 2023, my younger brother and only sibling, Matt, passed away.  He was only 40 and not having a will, his estate went into probate and the responsibility of untangling it fell primarily on me and my mom.

He left behind a 3-story house in St. Louis filled not only with the usual things like home goods and clothes, but several unique collections marking his varied passions since his teenage years. These included vintage stereo equipment, vinyl LPs, Japanese comics, WWII posters, video games, Lego sets, drones and bicycles.

I understand how overwhelming and emotionally difficult it is, it was several months until we could even approach the task. But eventually I started cataloging and doing research into his things, shipping many boxes of smaller items back to my photo studio in Brooklyn.

As a record collector and photographer, I had experience buying and selling albums and photo equipment on eBay and other platforms. Plus, I could make high-quality pictures, write good descriptions and had a knack for research and pricing. So I made my way through the smaller items in Brooklyn selling mostly on eBay and with the help of a friend in St. Louis, set up meetings with buyers locally for the larger stuff listed on Facebook Marketplace.

After several weeks of photographing, listing, packing, shipping and coordinating pickups in St. Louis, I successfully sold a good portion of my brother’s high-value items. Around that time, we met with a Realtor about selling his house. We got an offer even before the first open house and found ourselves on an accelerated track to get the house emptied and ready for sale. There we still quite a lot left to deal with.

She recommended a respected local estate sale company and we asked them to come by and evaluate what we had. The appraised value came in at only $1,500 for everything left in the house: including furniture, bicycles and bike tools, DVDs, books, video games, toy sets, Halloween decorations and parts from a Volkswagen that my brother had been modifying. They offered an option for a full clean-out following the sale, but that would cost (guess what) $1,500.

While it would have been a big weight off our shoulders to have them deal with it, it just didn’t sit right and I knew I could do a lot better even if it took a lot of work. My photography business had been slow, so this would be where I put my energy for the next few weeks.

By selling things thoughtfully, discovering that many items had a lot more value than I’d initially thought, and finding the right people on the right marketplaces, I netted over $8,000. After a friend took a minivan load of usable items to a local charity organization we didn’t even need a clean out, the house was empty.

But the satisfaction wasn’t just about the money. An unexpected benefit of this process was connecting with many people who shared my brother’s passions: Volkswagen people, Lego people, giant skeleton people, even rug people. Not every transaction was warm and fuzzy, but the majority were interesting encounters with enthusiastic, appreciative people and I felt some comfort and peace knowing the things he cared about would continue on.

I found the process of organizing, researching, listing and selling my brother’s possessions to be an empowering and healing experience. It allowed me to understand and appreciate who he was while also letting go of the emotional weight of his things which were now bringing happiness to new people.

I’m excited to lend these skills and abilities to help people navigate the physical, financial and emotional aspects of letting go of the things they and their loved-ones valued.

I named the company ‘Dunie Brothers’ after my great-grandfather Harry Dunie and his older brother Nathan, who were the first on my mother’s side to emigrate to America from Russia in the 1900’s. After operating a street cart, they opened Dunie’s Restaurant and Delicatessen in 1912 downtown at 13th Street and Delmar, which was run by the family until it closed in 1990. The deli was across the street from the former Globe Democrat and Post-Dispatch and hosted many reporters and editors from those newspapers.

My mom, Harriet, was named after Harry, and my brother, Matthew, was given Dunie as his middle name. I started this consultancy in memory of my brother and the pride he had in his family story.