I’m going to take a different view of this for people to consider:
My dad collected a lot of stuff. He wasn’t a hoarder because most of the stuff had value, but he had so many collections: Coins, stamps, cigarette cards, movie posters, movie memorabilia, LPs, CDs, DVDs, so many other things.
When he died, I had to deal with it. All of it. And I am not a material goods sort of person overall, so I didn’t want most of it. It took me years to sell off what I could. We couldn’t even sell off most of the DVDs, LPs and CDs. They ended up either given to friends or to thrift stores. I’m still dealing with it even though he died in 2016. Who wants a life-sized ceramic bust of Charlie Chaplin (dog for scale)?
Did I make money from selling it off? Absolutely. It even helped when we needed some money. But it really wasn’t worth the near-decade of stress I’ve had to go through to deal with this stuff and there really is no end in sight.
And now my mom is in her 80s and she has a house full of antique furniture like this which, again, I have no interest in (and no room for at this point).
Do not make your kids deal with this stuff unless they really want to. I said I would deal with it because my mom is just not good at this stuff and my brother lives too far away, but if I would do it again, I would either hire someone to deal with it all for a percentage and wash my hands of the whole thing or tell my dad that he needs to sell it off before he dies.
Instead of having a few items from my dad to really treasure, I ended up with a bunch of shit I didn’t want to deal with and it makes the stuff I do want to keep, most of which wouldn’t be worth a huge amount anyway, have much less sentimental value to me.
i understand all that but i don’t know how big your dog is
She has a head relatively the same size of a life-size ceramic Charlie Chaplin bust.
Wow, that’s quite a knickknack to have around.
How often do you have to explain to visitors that it’s Charlie Chaplin and not that other guy?
Never because it’s in a box in the garage. I’ve never been a huge Chaplin fan like my dad was. He’s much better when he’s serious than when he’s trying to be funny. The “look up, Hannah” speech at the end of The Great Dictator is definitely one of the great movie speeches and I highly recommend anyone here who hasn’t seen the movie at least read it, but his “kick each other in the pants” style of comedy never appealed to me. I was much more into Keaton.
I will say that I picked through my mom’s old LP collection and sprang for a player so I could start listening to some of her classic albums. Now I periodically throw on some Springstein or Beetles because its right there and I can. I also picked up a few newer records - the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, Father John Misty - and listen to them, too.
No idea what I’m going to do with my mom’s grand piano. She keeps trying to off-load that on me and all I can tell her is “It literally will not fit in the house.”
My dad was not into rock music at all. His collection was mostly film soundtracks, classical music and popular music from the 1930s and 1940s.
I like all of those things, but not enough to save the LPs or CDs. I can stream or download any of the ones I really want to listen to and enjoy it just as much, but not have it take up room in my not especially large house.
You have to understand, we’re talking thousands of LPs and CDs and hundreds of DVDs. Some of them were worth something, but most of them were worth pennies. The month I paid more to eBay than I did make any profits, I gave up.
This is just one part of the CD collection when it was still in their house. There were multiple other shelves.
I can’t find a picture of the LPs, but imagine a wall of them the size of 1.5 garage doors.
And this is just the music. This doesn’t begin to go into all the other stuff.
On top of everything else, he eventually got a DVD duplicator and a CD duplicator and just got whatever he wanted from video stores and the library and copied them. We just threw those out.
By the way, stamp collections are barely worth it unless you have a super rare stamp. He had a huge collection of first-day covers he had been collecting for my whole life. It went for $400.
You have to understand, we’re talking thousands of LPs and CDs and hundreds of DVDs
Oh yeah. You’ve got to weed out the good stuff from the bad. I took maybe 1-in-5 from my mom’s far smaller collection of LPs.
On top of everything else, he eventually got a DVD duplicator and a CD duplicator and just got whatever he wanted from video stores and the library and copied them. We just threw those out.
The worst thing I ever did was buy my mom a printer. She would go through stacks of paper in a month, just printing out whatever she thought she wanted to remember on the internet and sticking it in filling cabinets. I refused to show her how to change out the toner at one point, and that’s largely staunched the flow of dead trees.
By the way, stamp collections are barely worth it unless you have a super rare stamp.
Like all hobbies, you really need to find a community of other hobbyists before they’re worth anything at all. Even a super-rare stamp has no value unless its got an actual buyer. And how many people even still care if you’ve got a Civil War double-stamped limited edition whateverthefuck anymore? Unless you’re selling it straight to a museum, where are the buyers?
I do wonder whether I’ll live to see people with these giant Magic: The Gathering card collections claiming value at six-figures plus when WotC has long since gone bust and nobody plays the game anymore.
My wife’s cousin had a massive collection of Yu-Gi-Oh cards- we’re talking like fill a suitcase massive- and they’re basically worthless. He gave them all to our nephew about 10 years ago. He’s 18 now so I have no idea what he’ll do with them.
Too exhausted to grab images but…
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The amount I spent on college versus the amount that they spent on college
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their pension versus my pension
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cost of their home versus cost of my home
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amount of adults in their household that had to work to support a family versus amount of adults in my household that have to work to support a family
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Their CEO pay gap versus my CEO pay gap
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number of summers where they took a week-long family vacation versus number of summers that I took a week-long family vacation
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cost of a family trip to Disney for them versus no fucking way I could even consider affording that shit, let alone paying an overall subscription for quicker lines and somehow also individual extra charges per ride to get on those rides in less than three hours.
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Im leaving my grandkids a very cleanly optimized starter base in Factorio.
That’s an amazing gift
You mean one portal to hell vs one support call line to Sweden.
The Lion, the Witch, and the SMÅGÖRA
The Blåhaj, the Witch, and the Smågöra
Enjoy your affordable Swedish crap!
I mean, not anytime soon, but hopefully eventually.
C U B E
Here’s a picture of the furniture my grandparents left me:
Kallax is so easy to move though!
one is significantly 1) more useful and 2) does not cost $4000 to move next time the shitty apartment you’re renting gets sold to be “renovated” into luxury (cardboard) condos.
Left: useless because it’s ugly as hell and won’t fit in anywhere. Right: useless because it falls apart if you sneeze at it.
The amount of dust it will collect in all those crevices !!
Just order your maid to dust it twice daily with a feather duster, duh
The one on the left is built to last longer, and is practically timeless. The one on the right will probably fall apart after a few years of use, and eschews fucntion for a more “modern” design that will inevitably fall out of style.
(Please correct me if I’m wrong about any of this.)
I have some ikea pieces that I bought when I started grad school. They’re 10 years old, have been through 4 moves, and they’re still doing fine. Even better, I could move them myself without it being a huge strain. They aren’t high quality (which tends to seem to mean heavy and not disassemblable), but they’ve treated me pretty well.
May have mixed feelings about the “timeless” bit, depending deeply on how it’s meant. Do I think you’ll find a buyer at any given time in the foreseeable future? Probably, yes. But I would have very mixed feelings about having that in my house. (Space consumption, cool on its own to some degree but clashing with basically everything else and cherubs are not my jam, maybe a status symbol since it isn’t the norm.)
Idk the one on the right seems more like it’s throwing out any kind of style to be purely for function
Ikea’s stuff is fine for the price you pay. Oddly enough their solid pine items are really sturdy and usually among the cheapest since it’s so simple and comes unfinished. I have a Tarva queen sized bed and it’s great, plus I bought $8 of 2x2 and made custom length legs for it.
The one on the left wasn’t necessarily built to last longer. It was probably absurdly expensive back in the day and there were plenty of more cheaply made(but admittedly solid wood) options. No one is taking pictures of those less flashy pieces, though. Also you say timeless but, c’mon, it’s cool and all but definitely doesn’t fit everywhere. It screams “medieval castle” and is pretty over-the-top for basically any modern home, even grandma’s place.
The other thing about those shelves is that they’re a lot lighter than solid wood. When you want to place them in fun locations and need to use drywall anchors it’s a big thing to reduce the weight where you can. It’s not like people are displaying bowlingballs in them. They last a plenty long time unless you have a habit of trashing your place and there’s certainly such a thing as “over-built”. If that shelf “inevitably falls out of style” then style moves slower than I thought because they’ve been making and selling that thing for-fuckin’-ever. Most importantly it’s affordable in today’s world where executives have siphoned away all our money and the working class has been left without the funds to invest in quality furniture when the Ikea stuff does just fine.
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TL;DR the piece on the left was not common when it was made and the piece on the right has its merits, not least of which is accessibility.
As someone who’s moved a several tons of the furniture on the left, I’ll take the shit on the right all day. Not only is the shit on the left always incredibly heavy, it’s also ugly as hell and takes up an ungodly amount of space
