10 reasons to buy vintage

10 Reasons TO BUY VINTAGE , RECYCLED AND ANTIQUES....

1. CHEAPER....way cheaper....and if you can do a little work...way way cheaper
2. MORE INTERESTING....AND IN STYLE....just look at the magazines, the stuff we like is all over the popular press....and the midwest is probably the cheapest place in the country to buy great antiques and vintage
3. CREATIVE...you can go so many directions...classic, industrial, mission, romantic, shabby, steampunk, black, or DO YOUR OWN THING!!!!
4. BETTER MADE.... get real wood...poo on particleboard and furniture in a box...
5. CONNECTS YOU WITH THE PAST.... having old things around is just kind of soulful....and there is always something to learn....
6. GREENER...reuse, recycle, repurpose.....its fun and easy with antiques and vintage...
7. SUPPORTS LOCAL BUSINESSES.... buy locally !! SUPPORT YOUR AREA BUSINESSES.... find a good junk shop....and get old good old american made things.... from back when that meant quality...!!!
8. MORE FUN....definitely!!! and so outside the box, if thats your pleasure...
9. MORE VARIETY.... for sure... from buttons to mantles from steampunk to hankies....
10. MAKES YOU LOOK INTERESTING AND ADVENTUROUS ....look at the great antiquers in the world...from queen elizabeth to sanford and son...and the best stores are copying the look you can get if you go out into the antique market.. .

what ive learned about clocks, radios, anything mechanical

mainly ive learned that they dont work, there is always something wrong...maybe easy to fix maybe impossible........i never claim anything...

..no matter what the owner or auctioneer says when its being sold to me,,,, when it comes to me selling the mechanical object , the buyer will probably find something wrong with it..

..so my theory is ; buy it not to work, and just price it..........and dont claim anything....and if the buyer wants to keep going on the condition conversation , i just act dumb or throw in , well the auctioneer said it was good!!!! which is an easy laugh...

what ive learned about occupied japan....

i dont even buy it...hardly any collectors around here.....
it might have been kind of neat when there were lots of folks remembering ww2.....but really it was mainly just dimestore trinkets...nothing special...
my advice, dont bother , unless you just like the piece...

what ive learned about roseville....

if you are interested better get a book....the best patterns dont say roseville.....
the later common patterns are marked.....cracks and chips matter a lot!!!!
rrp co roseville ohio, isnt the good roseville...
.it was a great wedding present in the 40s.....
its still collected quite a bit....im buying it when possible...
like almost anything you can google roseville images and learn a lot....
in general, its better than hull, hall, weller, and mc coy..
again the books are so off....on the majority of patterns you would be lucky to sell for over half of the book value......on the rare patterns the values might be fantastic...

what ive learned about milkglass....

most of it isnt worth much at all....in the 50s and 60s the thousands of vases came with the flowers from the florist..... the older milkglass might have some book value....but i hardly ever get asked for it......westmoreland is supposed to be good, but again its not selling very well here.......
.......i see it in the mags sometimes, but i dont see that it has caught on...here in the midwest people could get it sooo cheap if they wanted it...
i would buy it to go in a white setting...but not for much money...and for home i love the victorian milkglass...i have several hands and some dresser pieces....

what ive learned about oak

ive sold oak for 30 yrs...a lot of oak.
its such a good seller ...here oak is still king...
....most of it is from the turn of the century and the 20 yrs before and after.....most of the fanciest most expensive oak has veneer...thats a good thing!! the golden oak period had wonderful carvings, bevelled mirrors,turned spindles, animal feet,....most of it was factory made...dressers, round oak tables, sideboards, secretaries, double secretaries, ladies desks, music cabinets, seated hall trees..... ...if you look thru a sears catalog from the early 1900s you can see what the housewife had to choose from...those catalogs are real treasure troves....
all this nice oak we dealers gladly refinish...its worth more refinished 99% of the time....the main reason not to refinish is that a real great picky dealer would hate your job and rather refinish it himself....in that case it is worth more refinished...and that kind of dealer probably only is interested in the top 10% of the oak world...not what we usually find......
its nothing like the damage you would do to something from the 1700s if you refinished it...thats what you see on the roadshow, mainly....

the exception is mission oak...those buyers almost always prefer original condition...

mission oak is darker plainer, nice and bulky..few curves or carvings..... the good words here are stickley...but all mission is pretty good in todays market....

oak carries a premium...an oak buffet is worth 2 times any other wood around here...and there is a tricky fake oak out there....we call it painted on grain...its also called german finish, or photograph oak....in other words its a fake oak grain over an inferior wood...it fools about everybody once....when you refinish it the grain comes off!!! its original....the painted on grain is blacker, and more uniform....you can look inside the case..and see if its oak on the inside....this wont work on a drawer since the drawer might be veneer and not oak all the way thru...

we have probably had over a hundred oak farm tables, the lilttle dropleafs that can stretch out to be harvest tables if you have the leaves.......i like the big oak cupboards .....and the big old hoosiers are still wonderful and hard to get...the big gaudy city oak is hard to find around here...most of our oak came out of the sears catalogs...
the picture above is what we call a chicago cupboard.... pulled out of a house and bought in the rough and rehabbed by the amish for us...that one is sold but we have 3 of the smaller versions right now...
i dont prefer oak at home but it is my favorite to sell... i would say green oak is built on oak...or at least has deep roots in oak....

what ive learned about silver

ive been buying and selling in the junk/antique world for about 30 yrs...hard to believe....and i know a LITTLE about a lot of things.....most learned the hard way....and often if i had known just a little more it would have been a whole lot better...
anyway..i would love to put some of ths fun useful stuff here on the blog...starting with silver...
here is what i have learned about buying and selling silver...its more poppular with southern people than midwestern....... sterling is what the buyers want.

IF ITS STERLING ITS MARKED STERLING....this is almost always true...exceptions...european, and mexican which is marked with numbers, like 800 825 etc....and coin silver which is from the early 1800s and i dont know but i can just tell...lol....and english...which is marked with hallmarks...which all mean something...but american sterling silver will almost always say sterling.......not always tho...

BAD WORDS... these little tricky words mean its not sterling,;;;; german silver, alpaca, alaska silver
GOOD WORDS. tiffany and george jensen or georg jensen ...these are very good words!!!
SILVERPLATE....most of the stuff out there is silverplate....most very unsaleable.... plate will say all kinds of stuff...silverplate, rogers, a1,tripleplate,sheffieldplate, community plate....but it wont say sterling........plate means ther is a thn coat of silver on base metal....you cant take it off, ...if you are out there buying most people think their good silver is sterling and really its plate..

..the difference? at our store a sterling spoon might be 15$ a plate spoon in the 1$ bucket....
i love old victorian silver plate...especially with the engraving...