Bonac Buy and Sell Has It All
It was unseasonably cold at 8 a.m. on Friday when Bonac Buy and Sell opened for business, but the chill did not stop those in search of almost anything imaginable from seeking out the Springs marketplace.
Indoors and out at 8 Washington Avenue, Morgan Roman and George Miller had arranged a huge array of merchandise, much of it culled from the real estate cleanouts they provide, among other services. Statues, dishes and utensils, art, exercise equipment, bicycles, tools, books, appliances, furniture, and much more were on display, all of it priced to sell, the proprietors said.
“We do estate cleanouts, garage cleanouts, any kind of cleanout,” Mr. Roman said. As part of that service, the men haul away the garbage free of charge — within reason, Mr. Miller said, citing some 7,000 pounds of it at one site — in exchange for the merchandise they have now amassed. “People are more than happy to have us come and do the cleanup for free as long we get some good stuff to sell,” Mr. Roman said. They also find stock at auctions of the unclaimed contents of storage containers.
“We’re on the police and village and town tow lists,” Mr. Miller said. “We do wrecking, we can be hired to run flatbeds. We’ll remove your gazebo, your storage container, storage shed, gun safe — anything that nobody else will move.”
Bonac Buy and Sell is a kind of brick-and-mortar version of the Bonac Yard Sale group on Facebook, where Mr. Roman and Mr. Miller, along with Mr. Miller’s wife, Allison, also post merchandise. “We’re in all types of houses, from small houses full of garbage to $25 million houses on Lily Pond Lane,” Mr. Roman said. “When you buy a house for $10 million, the contents mean nothing, really, whether you’re buying or selling. If you’re selling it, you want to leave; if you buy it, you don’t care because you want new stuff. We go to yard sales and buy, too. People get frustrated, whether it’s an estate sale or a yard sale — they just want to be done with it, they want the stuff gone. It’s a process they go through, and we try to make it easier for them.”
“A lot of it is their family heirlooms, and they don’t really want to throw it to the dump,” Mr. Miller said of yard sales. “The yard sale is only for one weekend; if the stuff gets exposed here for a couple more weeks, the more chance it’s going to sell. Sometimes, the yard sale rains out and people get aggravated and take it all to the dump. We want to change that.”
Rescue, restore, repurpose, and recycle is the mantra, said Mr. Miller. (With Ms. Miller, who works at the Veterinary Clinic and Hospital of East Hampton, the men also operate Just Us Animal Rescue.) With respect to inanimate objects, though, “If nothing else works, we’re going to recycle it properly.” Electronic equipment, particularly computers, contains materials that do not belong in landfills. “There’s probably eight or 10 different types of metals in your computer,” he said. “We can break them down right here. We’ll do it right in front of you, too.”
“We can give you your hard drive back, so your information is safe,” Mr. Roman added. “We do recycling of all types: electronic, all types of metal recycling.”
Bonac Buy and Sell is presently open Friday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., but plans call for expanded hours of operation. To that end, a “help wanted” sign was affixed to a table outside as of Friday. “We’re hoping someone will come here and say, ‘I want to be a part of this,’ ” Mr. Miller said, “because it’s going to take a unique person to help us do all of this.”