Next weekend I am moving to a new apartment with my boyfriend. We are currently packing up my stuff and getting ready to move to our new place. In the process of packing I dubbed him King of the Kitchen, meaning it is his job to finish the dishes and pack up everything in that room. While he was cleaning out one of my cupboards he said, “Hey, this is a cool set of tea cups back here.”
I never bought any tea cups. I found one in the cupboard and had been using it to scoop cat food, unaware that it had other matching cups and saucers hiding in the back of the top shelf up there. His being a giant of a man allowed him to see all the way back there which, at my full height of 5’5" I am not able to do, even while standing on a chair. He pulled them out and I grabbed the cup out of the cat food bag and we set them up on the counter. I didn’t want to keep them so I put them in the trash and said, “Watch me be throwing out $50,000 worth of antique china or something!” His response was, “Well, if it has any value there will be a stamp of some kind on the bottom of each piece.” So I turned them over to see a gold stamp labeled Imperial Italian Art (or some such thing, I don’t remember exactly what it said) and quickly pulled them back out of the trash. We went on line to do a search and found another set that isn’t nearly as cool from the same company on eBay for $395!
Antiques Roadshow is coming through Atlantic City in a couple of weeks so we are going to try to get ahold of 2 tickets so we can take our new treasure to be appraised. Pretty excellent find for something that was left behind as trash by the previous tenant!
If you’re curious, you can look them up on the Replacements website. Replacements sells china, silver and glassware as one-offs to replace pieces that have become lost or broken.
That’s really cool but from the thread title I was kind of hoping you had brought a tiny Native American from the 1800s, or discovered a portal to a land of centaurs and talking lions.
I hope you’ll contact the previous resident to check if this belonged to them. If you left something valuable behind I’m sure you’d want the next person to contact you. It might also be valuable from a sentimental perspective and was tucked up there by someone your height on a step ladder then overlooked when they moved out. They may not even know that it’s missing.
I would love to contact the previous owner but the building was bought by a new company and the original landlord went out of business long ago. I’ve lived here for years now and have no way of finding out who might have lived here before me. Heck, I don’t even get old magazine subsriptions or anything to find out their name. At this point if they don’t know they are missing and I can’t track them down I don’t really know how I would go about returning these to their original owner.
Oh…errrmmm, so that’s where I left those teacups…I’ve been looking everywhere for them! But yeah, now that I think about it, I don’t remember packing them when we moved away from…ummm…there.
If you kindly mail them back to me, there’s a shiny $10 bill in it for you as a finder’s fee.
I took pictures last night and I will post them tonight after we get back from the baseball game. The label on the bottom of the cups says, “Imperial Italian Art” and has a gold leaf design. I took a picture of that for you too.
When tygre and her ex moved into an apartment some years ago, they found a tuba in the closet. I can see leaving a cup behind, but a tuba?
I’m particularly jealous of your find because the only “valuables” I remember finding in an apartment were a German 1 Deutsche Mark coin (now worthless as Germany is on the Euro) and a 20,000 Turkish Lira note, which I thought was awesome 'till I found out that at the then-current exchange rate it was worth about 30 cents…and six years later, it was worth about 1.2 cents.
Thanks! I finally know the name of some china we received as an engagement present about 9 years ago! It’s okay and country looking but our 2yo loves the mugs!