I don't see anything sad about it
Maybe I didn't explain properly what that house was like, most of the pictures don't capture the truly terrible state of that place.
The electrical work in the house was all done by hand, poorly. The lights in the bedrooms were old lamps with the base broken off, wired up and hung from the ceiling by the electrical cord. Wired up poorly as it turns out, I was electrocuted trying to turn on one of them, and a big puff of black smoke came up from the socket/switch.
The hallways/stairs had approximately a half foot of space that could be walked down, sideways. Either side of the hallways (and stairs had things piled up about five feet high. If you bumped something as you walked by, an avalanche of plastic figurines, electronics, old magazines, binoculars, camping equipment, etc. would come falling down on you.
The old guy's dresser drawers had long been too buried in junk for the guy to reach them. So he bought new clothing at some point, and kept the new clothing in a pile in his living room on top of the pile of electronics that was piled on top of the violin cases. He had no washing machine, and it didn't smell like any of the clothing he was using had been washed in quite some time.
Every surface in that house was covered in mouse/rat droppings and urine. I was pouring mouse feces out of the guitars. I saw many rodents scurrying away as I moved guitars. That bedspread that people were commenting on was heavily encrusted with mouse poop. It was also the only room that the old guy could have been sleeping in.
The roof leaked in several places. This caused large black patches of mold to grow on the walls. The wallpaper was falling off the walls in most rooms from the water damage. It was impossible to see the original colour of the carpet under the years of black dirt that had been ground into it.
There was no central heating or air conditioning in the house. All of the windows were nailed shut, caulked (with old peeling caulking) and covered with plastic wrap to keep the air in during the winter. It was sweltering hot when I was cleaning. We found three electric space heaters. . . that's the only thing that the old guy used to keep from freezing to death during the frigid Ottawa winters. I guess he moved them from room to room to keep warm during the winter.
I'm not even going to talk about the state of the bathroom.
If you don't see anything sad about an 80-90 year old guy living in those conditions, then you've got a pretty hard heart. My dad bought the farm from the original owners with the old guy living there, and basically let him live there for free for 10 odd years. The guy was always pretty solitary/hermitlike and we had never seen the inside of the house up to this point. If we had known what the state of the place was, we would have evicted him long ago. For his own good. Nobody should live like that.
The quilt on the bed in guitar room #1 looks to be hand-stitched, and if so it's almost certainly both an antique and valuable.
Yeah, didn't even notice that. But it's odd to reflect that if he'd collected coins, postage stamps, paintings, or something else socially acceptable (and was a little better at housekeeping), no one would have thought anything of it.
He did collect coins, postage stamps, paintings, and other socially acceptable stuff. I was mostly taking pics of the guitars because that's where my interests lay. That place was FAR beyond a little housekeeping. The pics you're seeing are after we'd removed bags and bags of literal garbage so that it was free enough to move around a bit.