Have you ever had a large quantity (or an estate) of antiques/art appraised? If so, please share what it was like!
My long story short, my mother collected antiques and some original art, she died, my father wants to sell the house and downsize considerably, and now he has a house full of antiques and art that he wants to get rid of. He may end up giving it all to Goodwill, but he’d like to have some idea of what it’s worth (either piece by piece, or the entire lot as a whole).
My dad lives down the road from a professional antiques auctioneer and appraising firm, but it’s in a wealthy area and we don’t have any context to gauge whether their appraisal fees are standard or are higher than usual due to the location. We also don’t know what’s typical to expect in a situation like this – is it normal for appraisers to walk through your house and see everything in its site, or do you usually pack up the individual pieces you want them to appraise and take it to their offices, or…?
Also, the original art is primarily by one artist who is still alive and is a friend of the family. (Now distant friends, but still easily contactable). She’s a legit artist with gallery showings in NYC, but I don’t think she’s famous. Some of the art we have of hers is really neat and I could easily see someone wanting to buy it; other stuff is on the “WTF, you paid for that?!” level. Would it be appropriate or insulting if we offered to return the latter to her? (Politely, of course! “These pieces are so lovely, but my new house can’t accommodate them all, unfortunately – would you like us to return them to you?” Or however we could word it…that’s another thread. )
On preview: Let me clarify that I’m talking about a 4-bedroom suburban house-worth of stuff here, not, like, a Main Line Old Money museum-size and -quality collection. I can take some sample pictures, if that would help.
I have no idea but are there appraisal fees if you are going to be selling the stuff through the same firm? Because they’re going to make money from the buyers’ commissions. So if they do a walkthrough of your house and determine that your stuff will appeal to their usual buyers, I imagine they’d be happy to take it to auction without appraisal fees.
Right you have to decide what you want: if you are going to have an appraisal done (for which you pay serious money) then you want to make clear that you will not be selling through that firm-otherwise there is a big conflict of interest. But that company will provide for free an opinion about if they want to handle the sale. Likewise estate tagsale firms will do the same.
I am thinking you might find out which galleries specialize in the artist and sell the artwork separately.
It could but maybe not; which is why searching online (eBay and the like) may not tell you as much as we would like. “Looks like” and “is the same as” can be very different things.
The art is easy; contact the artist, explain the situation, and see if she has a gallery that represents her. Offer her a small cut in addition to the gallery’s fee. It may not be the biggest lump you can get but it will be fair and fairly easy.
As for the rest, decide how much time/effort you want to invest. And then shoot me a PM and I can give you my number. In our case, we didn’t want to put in time - we would have had to take that time away from helping and visiting Muvver. So we made one set of choices. A cousin on the other hand had just retired and made his mothers stuff his time-killer. He made very different choices.
I worked in coins and jewelry for a lot of years; I know all the tricks and traps. And the same ones in our game are out there in furniture, glass and everything else.
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