You couldn’t walk more than 20 feet into the three-bed, two-bath house in East Arlington a couple months ago.
Boxes, stacked almost floor to ceiling, were set up with paths from the front door to the fridge, each packed with something cat themed and meticulously organized by color and type. Figurines, cookware, wall decor, blankets and clothes in those boxes were tied up inside multiple bags, the boxes labeled “red cats” or “bronze.”
There were thousands of cat-themed items, accumulated by a woman who didn’t actually own a real cat, according to Eric Uzelac.
That was the state of the house he first stepped through the front door months ago.
“The family asked me if I would buy the house and everything in it,” Uzelac said. “I got the feeling they didn’t want anything else to do with it. It was just too much.”
But that’s what Uzelac specializes in - he runs an estate sale business alongside Happy Monkey Farms plant nursery.
After months of sorting, organizing and cleaning, garage sales and online auctions, Uzelac held the first round of the official estate sale Jan. 16-18, but there was so much he said they're restocking, pricing items and will have another round the weekend of Feb. 14.
And the cats and quantity aren't the only things that make this sale unique for Uzelac. For instance, he doesn’t normally buy the houses when he goes to organize an estate sale, but something about this one spoke to him.
“I joke with people and tell them I bought the home for this and the disco ball that was in here, which is kind of a joke, but not really,” Uzelac said.
He deadpans the medication he was on might have played a role.
His first sale since waking from a coma
Uzelac was put into a medically induced coma in November 2023 while visiting his partner who was attending Virginia Tech. Uzelac was visiting him for Thanksgiving, and on Black Friday he went into the hospital with an especially dangerous pneumonia infection.
The doctors decided a coma was the best course of action and when he woke up months later, Uzelac was at a facility in Alexandria, hours away from the hospital in which he’d been put in the induced coma.
He was in the hospital for 10 months.
“It was crazy waking up not being able to walk and not realizing that you can't walk or just even piecing everything together,” he told KERA News. “Realizing that it's February and you missed Christmas and New Year's and your birthday and lots of other things. But I had an amazing group of people around me. I mean, there's a lot of people that went a really long way just to be there for me.”
When he returned to Texas on July 4, 2024, Uzelac was still walking with a cane because of the muscle atrophy that happens when someone is in a coma. He credits those people who gathered around to support him with his recovery.
And medication or not, Uzelac said buying the house along with its contents was the right choice. The quirky contents made his first estate sale since waking up a joyous experience, and owning the home gave him the time to sort through the overwhelming mass of filled boxes at his own pace.
It hasn’t been easy — it took him about 30 minutes to move a couch on his own from the living room to the street so it could be loaded up and donated.
But even with the physical struggles, Uzelac said each step both helped him rebuild his body and showed him that recovery was possible.
Now, after months of work, he and a team of friends are putting on the finishing touches. The boxes that were erected to create narrow pathways throughout the house are almost all gone — though the garage and a renovated ambulance in the driveway are still packed with cat stuff. Surfaces have been dusted, floors cleaned and everything organized.
And now, after several garage sales and countless online auctions to help thin the hoard, Uzelac was ready to welcome people into the home for the first weekend of the estate sale.
The selection of items for sale inside the house range from cute figurines to framed cat rugs hanging on the walls to a fireplace screen made of wood (Uzelac questions the wisdom of using it as a screen in front of an actual fire) with cute cat faces painted all over it.
The Garfield selection is surprisingly small with only a tea kettle set out for sale. Uzelac said that’s because everything else Garfield-themed sold quickly in the online auctions.
The first weekend
Folks started showing up outside the house around 8 a.m. Jan. 16 for the first day of the official estate sale. By the time he opened the doors at 10 a.m., the line stretched from the back door, down drive way and down the sidewalk along the front of the house.
The "Crazy Cat Lady Purrrge," as Uzelac named the sale, was even more popular than he expected.
Most came from nearby neighborhoods in Arlington, but others drove from Denton, Alvarado and Irving to check out the offerings.
Those who showed up closer to 10 a.m. waited for up to an hour to get inside, like Jordon Lecky. She got to the house about 10 minutes before Uzelac opened the back door and started letting people in.
She spent the hour she waited outside in the cold wind talking with others in line, sharing their amazement over photos of the house’s interior posted on social media and estate sale websites and talking about what they hoped would still be there when they got inside.
She’d hoped to find a stained-glass lamp with cats on it and a Felix the Cat clock. They were both already sold before she got into the house, but she wasn’t too disappointed – there was plenty else to catch her eye.
Browsing through the “Blue Room,” as it was dubbed for its blue and white decor, Lecky held her finds in her arms. Among them were potholders with cats on them, a blanket with cats and a 4-foot-long wall banner with, of course, more cats on it.
“It's amazing. If you pick an item, it's gonna have a cat on it. I mean it's a ninety percent assurance,” Lecky said as she looked over shelves with delftware-styled cat figurines. “I haven't even barely touched the iceberg yet.”
Echo Dawson showed up earlier – at around 8:30 a.m. – and got in around 10 a.m. It was close to noon when she was done looking and walked out with a porcelain cat with green eyes, brass cat figurines, cat bathroom decor and a cat sweater.
She drove from Denton for the sale, while Maritza Rincon and her father, Tony Rincon, drove from Alvarado to in search of treasures for her daughter. She told her about the “crazy cat lady house,” knowing it would pique her interest.
“I was like, ‘there's all kinds of cats,’ and she's like, ‘live ones?’ ” Maritza Rincon said. “I'm like, ‘no ma'am. You already got too many of them.’ ”
Martiza Rincon said that didn’t damper her daughter’s excitement.
Standing outside the house, bundled up in jackets to keep warm in the chilly wind, she said their goal was to find the smallest cat figures they could.
Restocking and Round 2
The gray remodeled ambulance sitting in front of the beige house’s one-car garage on non-sale days makes it immediately recognizable as the place. It’ll also make it easy to restock the house.
Even after all the garage sales and online auctions, Uzelac knows he’ll need to open the house up to shoppers for multiple weekends.
The garage and ambulance are still both packed in full. He and his team will be going out to the garage and ambulance off and on throughout the day during the first weekend of the sale, grabbing more things to restock as people buy.
Even before the first customers walked through the door, Uzelac knew the four-day sale wouldn’t be enough to clear out everything he found in the house. The “Purrrge” will continue Feb. 14 when the house is restocked.
James Hartley is the Arlington Government Accountability Reporter for KERA News.
Got a tip? Email James Hartley at jhartley@kera.org. You can follow James on X @ByJamesHartley.
