The Folly of “It Might Be Worth Something”
There's a better question you should be asking yourself.
I often encounter people holding on to things that:
They don’t use
They have no plans to use
Are taking up valuable space.
Why do we hold onto things like this with no obvious utility?
Here’s what hooks so many of us: the idea that the item could be valuable.
People will go generations passing around stuff no one uses, no one plans to use, yet no one can bear to get rid of for this reason.
I’m here today with a reframe: They are asking the wrong question.
The question isn’t: But what if it’s valuable?
The question should be: What’s the alternative, realistically?
That grandfather clock that no longer works that a long-ago ancestor brought over on a boat (you think) might be worth a lot. If you’re going to use and love it in your home, wonderful. Problem solved.
But if not, realistically here’s what needs to happen for you to capture some hypothetical value from the clock:
Locate a repair shop that can fix the antique clock
Figure out how to transport huge thing to said shop
After it’s working (which I’m sure will cost a pretty penny), find the right avenue to sell it
Post an ad, field inquiries
If it sells, figure out how to package it and schlep it to a shipping place
Are you really going to do all that? If you can’t tell, I’m arching a brow skeptically.
Realistically, I’m betting what you’ll do is let it sit unused in your [basement/attic/storage unit] indefinitely. You might hope some future relative will adopt and love it (spoiler: this is very unlikely.)
OR…
Or, you could find charity shop, post it on your neighborhood Buy Nothing group, or call up your city’s antique shop to see if someone might want it. And then give it away. For free.
You’ll be liberating the item from fallow obscurity and giving it a new shot at a life. In exchange, you receive the gift of never again having to deal with storing this item or ruminating on its fate. And the recipient will likely enjoy making use of it.
I did this once with a bulky item I was storing and it literally brought tears to my eyes to see it carried off with new owners, living its best life.
I was reminded of this lesson recently with some antique chandeliers that came with my 1905 house. They were original to the home, but had old wiring and weren’t quite our taste so we did the unthinkable and replaced them. I wrapped them carefully and stored them in the basement. You know, for someone else to deal with one day.
(We think we are being sensitive by saving precious things, but we are mostly just creating work for someone else and/or our future selves.)
During a COVID era purge, I tried giving them away on Buy Nothing but there were no takers, and a few people said I shouldn’t give them away because they might be valuable (here we go…). So I kept them another few years. I reasoned that the next owner of our home might want them, though they’d be impossible to re-install without getting rewired.
Ironically, the most perfect home for the chandeliers exists in my neighborhood: Hippo Hardware, a Portland institution for all kinds of antique fixtures, from bathtubs to door locks to lights. They specialize in rewiring antique light fixtures to make them compatible with modern homes.
As I brought my dusty cardboard box of chandeliers through Hippo’s doors, it occurred to me I hadn’t even done a cursory Google search to see if my fixtures had special value. But then I reminded myself that the alternative to me gifting them to Hippo was for them to languish indefinitely in the basement. Quickly unloading them today was clearly the better path.
The Lighting Guy at Hippo was excited about the iridescent shades on one of the chandeliers and insisted on giving me $100 in store credit in exchange. Deal!
Now the chandeliers have the best possible chance of being used and loved for another century. They were doing no good to anyone in my basement. And maybe I squandered a fortune, but let’s be real — I was going to squander it either way.
At least this way the wonderful workers and customers of Hippo Hardware might benefit.
Now You
What’s something you’re proud you finally gave away after storing it for way too long? What’s next on the chopping block?
My mother loved Fiesta ware and all of the related midcentury bright or pastel colored dishes. She haunted estate and garage sales and the joy she got from getting a piece for a dollar or so, thinking she’d found a valuable item in the jumble was great to see. She had her finds displayed in her home, and then when she downsized, the fiesta ware was carefully wrapped and packed and she purchased an outdoor storage shed which ended up being the repository for all of the stuff she had accumulated but wouldn’t fit in her little cottage. The oil paintings that had been done by my grandmother and a great aunt. The dishes. The “antiques” furniture that didn’t fit in the new place. It all sat there for seven years and then when she died, my brother and I had to open aaaall the boxes and decide what to do with it.
A local antiques shop owner came over, looked at all of the stuff and offered me $100 for the furniture—done. He wouldn’t take any of the fiesta—he said he had a lot of it and it just didn’t sell. We decided to donate it—mom had fun treasure hunting, picking each item out of other people’s mess and thinking she’d found a valuable item that I figured we’d let somebody else have that fun.
Clearing out an elderly person’s stuff is a clarifying experience. Nothing gives you a reality check like seeing a long lifetime’s worth of accumulation having exactly NO value or meaning to anybody else, and in fact it is a burden on those who are left to clear it up.
I am still somehow guilty of this, but as a former historic archaeologist, I can promise you that your old stuff is almost certainly not worth anything. Even if you're sure it's 200+ years old (my dad thinks his china cabinet came to the US on the boat from Ireland in the 1840s but I dated it to the 1940s). At this point in human history, a lot of old items that people have in their homes were mass produced and there are just so many of the same thing out there, if it's not specific and rare it's unlikely to be monetarily valuable.