apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Now that's some serious vindication, to a natural hoarder.

How nice for that man that he kept it! I have a tea pot that was my grandmothers and there was some question as to whether it was silver plate or sterling silver and it turned out to be sterling silver. It is beautiful too so double bonus.

Is this the Thursday giveaway? Yay!

And he shot it with a rifle because???

...and this is why I love BBC's Antiques Roadshow...once a woman came in with a battered first edition of Beatrix Potter's Tale of Peter Rabbit, one of 200 self published exemplars, and personally inscribed by Potter to this woman's family. The expert said it was worth far less because it was so battered and then calmly told her she should insure it for 20,000 pounds. I don't think I've ever heard a collective gasp that loud since.

Me? Not much that's old and valuable, but a few old and fun things...that have personal but no monetary value. And I won't be using them for target practice either.

Don't be surprised if a later story shows that it was really looted from Iraq during the invasion.

It's the holy grail!

When my grandfather gives me things I usually take them out and shoot at them as well.

000- Actually Iran is Persian, not Iraq but i'm sure it was taken at some point as a souvenir by a traveler/soldier. Didn't Brittan have control of Iran at the turn of the century as some colonial movement?

I HAVE A LATE 1930S STAND UP WOODEN RADIO THAT WAS PASSED DOWN FOR 3 GENERATIONS. ITS STILL GOT SICK BASS AND WORKS IF YOU HOLD YOU ARM UP JUST SO....

At the top of the stairs in the farmhouse in which I grew up, we had a tall bookcase. In the bookcase was a small Statue of Liberty figurine. One day, it fell over and my dad blamed my brother for it. In retribution for the false accusation, every morning after that my brother tipped the statue on its side on his way downstairs. Every evening when he went to bed, dad would right it.

My father never said anything, but one day after several months, sitting next to the righted statue my brother found an antiques book, opened to a photo of the statuette. It was not a cheap carnival knock-off, but rather an original from the late 1800s, and worth thousands of dollars.

Never a word was spoken between them, but after that my brother left the statue alone.

He shot at it because he was a little boy, and it was 1945. Lots of little boys had air guns back then.

JACKPOT! i wonder what the look on his face was when they told him

imagine that you make something and it lasts millenia, more or less as you made it... it made me think of that line in "The Lord of the Rings" when Merry stabs the Witch-King and the narrator says something like glad would he have been who wrought it slowly long ago in Westernesse with spells against the dread realm of Angmar and it's sorcerer king.

haha - i'm in line with jick. nothing worth an auction, just plenty of chuck e cheese tokens... but thats all right with me.

There's some sort of gold something or other that was passed down from my grandfather (oldest in his family) to my oldest younger brother (skipping my mother and myself). An heirloom on the Chinese side that apparently goes down the male line (didn't go to my grandfather's nephews, though). This did not help me be any less of a militant feminist as a tween (my egalitarian nature was still perfectly okay with eldest children inheriting all, however).

I did inherit a good mechanical/spatial sense and the ability to assemble furniture without instructions from my grandfather, though, (he built his last home by himself in his 70s) and that's come in pretty handy.