A few months ago I received an email from my mother that contained sobering news. My parents close neighbors of more than 41 years, the Miller family, was going to sell their house. The Miller’s were closing in on 80 years of age and it was time to move to someplace with less maintenance. They chose a townhouse in a retirement community, where someone else cuts the lawn, fixes the AC and repaints the fence.
This was really the end of an era for my parent’s neighborhood. My parents were the first ones to move onto their street in November 1977. But the Miller family was a close second, occupying their house in the spring of 1978.
However, my purpose here isn’t to take you on a trip down memory lane. Instead I want to talk about what my mother revealed in one of her subsequent emails. The Miller family was planning on having an estate sale to help clean out their house in preparation for their departure.
As is so often the case in these situations, the Miller’s children had no interest in taking on their parent’s lifetime of accumulation. I can empathize with this reaction. My own parent’s house is filled to the gills with junk. When the time comes, my sister and I have (jokingly) discussed burning it all to the ground rather than sorting through it.
But I’m willing to sift through a substantial amount of trash if there’s some treasure to be found.
And that’s why the Miller’s estate sale was so intensely interesting to me. An estate sale is simply a public auction or tag sale of more or less the entire contents of a house. Although any number of motivations can prompt the decision, there are two big reasons to hold an estate sale. The first is to assist in the liquidation of a deceased person’s household belongings. The second is to clear out an elderly person’s debris from decades of living when the time comes to downsize.
The Miller’s case was obviously the latter situation. This meant that their estate sale came with a couple of caveats. One was that they wouldn’t be selling everything. A lot of clothing, personal items and sentimentally meaningful things would make the trip with them to their new townhome. In addition, Mr. and Mrs. Miller would be there in person to either accept or reject any offers made.
In any case, upon hearing the news of an estate sale, I sprung into action. I immediately compiled and sent a list of items I was interested in to my mother so that she could relay them to Mrs. Miller. These items will be familiar to any regular reader of my site: vintage jewelry, sterling silverware, mechanical wristwatches, fountain pens, old coins, etc. Antique, compact and precious is the name of my game and estate sales are often an excellent place to find them.
I was particularly interested in the Miller’s estate sale because it had some auspicious factors that I often look for when antiquing. Of course, these factors don’t guarantee that I’ll have a successful excursion. But they sure do increase my odds.
First, I knew from firsthand experience that the Millers had been living in their home for over 40 years. That means 40 years of stacking things up and rarely cleaning things out. This is a plus for the antiques enthusiast who wants everything to be as old and as undisturbed as possible.
In effect, you want to be an archeologist peeling back the layers of history. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a treasure that someone is willing to part with for a reasonable price.
Next, the Millers are a fairly well-to-do family. This is important because the richer the family, the more likely that they own nice stuff. And when we are picking, nice stuff is exactly what we are looking for.
This rule of thumb actually applies to other venues besides estate sales. Garage sales, thrift shops and antique stores all carry a selection of items related to the current and historical wealth specific to that particular geographical area. Simply put, you want to shop in rich neighborhoods because second-hand shops located in those areas are more likely to have nicer antiques. Of course, the prices are often higher in the tonier neighborhoods, so it isn’t all upside.
I was also aware that the entire Miller family (kids included) had moved to Great Britain for two years during the late 1980s because of Mr. Miller’s work. This meant that they had established a functioning household in Europe, complete with the possibility of art, antiques and other precious items. And it is a near certainty that when the Millers returned to the U.S., they brought back any European bounty they had acquired overseas.
Even if Mr. and Mrs. Miller had no interest in antiques whatsoever, vintage British wristwatches, fountain pens or sterling tableware from the 1970s and 1980s could still be a veritable gold mine. In fact, my mother did say to me that Mrs. Miller had mentioned old watches and antique English silver, including sterling napkin rings. Now napkin rings might not be tremendously fashionable items at the moment, but I will not hesitate to buy them with cash money if the price is right.
And this leads us to my parting thoughts. The erratic, bubble-prone economy of the last two decades has hollowed out the balance sheet of the average American family. We are getting poorer and poorer as a nation, often regardless of how long or hard we work.
Tangible physical assets like bullion, vintage jewelry, sterling silverware and other antiques are one of the few remaining effective ways to pass wealth from generation to generation. It is a pity that many older households are flushing their family heirlooms out the door because their adult children don’t want to bother with them. But, if an estate sale is going to happen anyway, isn’t it better that you and I stand ready with fistfuls of dollars to pick up whatever treasures we can on the cheap?
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