I can totally understand this. My wife and I have a house. When we first bought our house 15 years ago we probably would have taken some furniture from my parents. But they are still alive and using that furniture. Now our house is furnished so we have no room for their furniture.
This is not a new problem.
When my grandfather died about 40 years my parents and my uncle were in much the same position. They had already furnished their houses. So I think only one piece of furniture a small corner cabinet was taken in by my mother.
Simpler, non-ornate wooden furniture made from fairly thick wood is my favorite. I’ve repurposed many pieces over the years. My drill press & my radial arm saw are both mounted onto older piece of solid furniture.
My oak coffee table that had been chewed on my 2 pups and 1 son over the years got new hand made oak legs and the rectangle top got rounded off as the corners were hopeless. Refinished the entire table and made 3 side table to match the style.
I have re-purposed and refinished plenty of old wood furniture. When my mother moved she had to have her cherry dining room set hauled away because no one wanted it. We have plenty of wood furniture already and didn’t need it but if circumstances were different I would have gone down and picked it up just for the value of the wood and the brass and bronze fixtures.
This situation is a boon for anyone who wants old furniture, there’s a ton of it available.
I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad. Just that I have met so many people where this was their dream, they did it, they stress all their lives just to make the payments on the things that they have.
It works out to a lifestyle where basically all their life, they are either at work, commuting (these places have to be far from the city due to geography), fixing the place (mcmansions tend to be shoddily built and need endless repairs and updates), or for just a brief period of time, they are probably enjoying themselves…in the one room of the house they actually use frequently, the one with the TV in it.
Because they are financially overextended they are of course strongly conservative and rant about even tiny increases in taxes - because they are making 6 figures as a household but really just scraping by after making all their monthly payments.
If that’s what they want to do with their lives, who am I to judge, but from the outside, it looks like no way to live to me.
I never realized inheriting furniture was a thing. It’s always been something you use until it’s broken or unwashable, and then throw out and buy new. Like shoes.
It is now mostly. Once upon a time good furniture was an investment. Most everybody would have some tables and chairs but sometimes they were nothing but planks and crates. Decent furniture used to be a symbol of economic status. You purchased, built, or inherited good solid furniture. Now good solid furniture is inexpensive. Sure, a lot of it won’t last a lifetime, but the cost is so low it doesn’t matter. It will work perfectly well for a while, and will look fine until the plastic veneer starts to peel. If you care at that point a replacement won’t cost much at all.
It’s really not that hard to find 10 acres for ‘less than a fortune’. My brother owns a 2500 sq ft house on 7.5 acres that cost him around $275k. You won’t get that price near any of the big cities in CA or right around NYC, go within an hour and a half of somewhere like RTP or Atlanta and it’s easy to do. If you’re retiring and don’t need to be near a city at all, it’s even easier. And if you’re talking about expensive real estate, in California a $750k mortgage is super-cheap from everything I hear.
Also, isn’t “40-50 hours a week for 30+ years?” a pretty normal plan for working? Most people have to work at least 30 years full-time to be able to retire, and full time is minimum 40 hours a week. You say it like it’s some number no one would do, but I think that’s a pretty common thing.
Another thing is that needs have changed. In decades past, people kept their clothes in a chest of drawers or in an armoire. Today, they might have a walk-in closet with a closet system, with a series of hanging rods, shelves and drawers to store the clothes, and little furniture in the actual bedroom. And instead of a china closet, they might keep the dishes and such in kitchen cabinets.
For many years the only “real” furniture my wife and I owned was the stuff we inherited; mostly china cabinets, and they looked very out of place among our other furniture that was all cheap IKEA particle board garbage. We’ve definitely inherited more than we’ve kept; a lot of stuff that got dumped on us may be vintage but just utilitarian, so we only kept the nicest pieces.
As we’ve gotten older and started earning better wages we’ve replaced the IKEA shit piece-by-piece with fairly modest but still much more expensive solid wood furniture. We don’t and won’t ever have children, and we don’t expect our nieces and nephews or other relatives to ever want any of this stuff, antique or not, but we’ll see. We took it because we liked it; it’s not at all about just storing them to pass down someday.
What I mean is, if you view it like “how many hours do I have to work to pay this place off, pay off all the furniture, and pay all the expenses while I am living in it”, that’s about what it takes. It’s a poor ratio of enjoyment to labor.
Like, you could work 1-3 hours (depending on pay rate) and get a new Xbox game and enjoy yourself for 20 hours. Amazing bargain. Or work for 10-20 hours and get a table that will collect dust. Or 160 hours just to make this month’s mortgage and insurance payments.
See what I mean? You could have lived somewhere cheaper with a better bang/buck ratio.
A lot of vintage stuff just doesn’t look/work well in a modern home.
E.g., my last major-ish furniture purchase was a new entertainment console. Something low and wide to hold a TV on top and various components and what not underneath. Not something my grandparents were likely to have owned.
I searched around. A “real” console would be well over a thousand.
While shopping in the “furniture” district near us I stopped by the outlet store of a national chain. Incredibly depressing. Even the marked down, clearance stuff was overpriced and total crap. $500 for a dinged up ugly chunk of fiberboard. Gesh.
For a lot less than that I got an unfinished kit of real wood. Finished it. Assembled it. Looks great. Should last a good long time.
Yes, which is why mrAru and I have spent 25 years living in an 800 square foot house [with 1200 sq foot barn for messy arts and crafts and animals].
I am rather fond of Craftsman furniture, I inherited a lovely Stickley armchair [not fond of the leather cushions, but what the hell, I didn’t buy it, my Great Grandfather did.] It will, with proper care last at least a couple hundred more years [I would imagine changing the cushions out, or at least recovering them, at least every 75 to 100 years … ] <hey, I have mentioned that my family doesn’t throw stuff away, my ‘good china’ was ordered for my g’g’grandfather’s marriage in 1830. Trust me, I have the original receipt for it in the family trove of paperwork somewhere. I remember seeing it maybe 15 years ago when I was rummaging looking for something else.>
This has been a long term trend. My dad ran a reupholstery business up until near his death nearly thirty years ago. By the end he was going on leads and had to tell people that their furniture was not worth reupholstering. For the same money they could buy some new disposable crap.
The old pieces though … they will last, unlike the disposable shit. Little made like that in the last several decades though. “Heirloom furniture” is now “mid-century modern” … which was the cheap crap of my youth. Furniture did not used to be a disposable item but “used to be” is already quite a while ago.
Along similar lines … as my wife and I approach being empty nesters we are going to be moving from our house to a condo and are prepping our house for sale. Per our realtors (they work as a two person team) the current group of buyers want grays and whites, cool not warm, and all the wood that my generation of buyers stripped and refinished they are painting over.
well good thing I haven’t invested in all those power tools for my retirement hobby yet.:mad:
wanders off muttering dire things into his beard about the mass marketed crap and kids these days and now he has nothing but lawn care to look forward to
They’ll pry my wood working tools from my dead hands someday but I am looking forward to giving up yard work. Just did my leaves yesterday and I’m getting too (and too fat) for this crap. I have 2 acres and look forward to having a small lot with minimal trees and no more oaks.
There are people still who want quality furniture, who live with the ethos that, “Furniture should be built to last at least as long as it would take to regrow the tree that it came from.”
At least that’s what I muttered to myself, delivering a walnut dresser to my son and daughter in law last weekend. Hoping to the gods of walnut that nobody takes white paint to this thing before I am dead and buried.
Ultimately, it was only the early 1800s or so that consumer culture got it’s barest early beginnings. And it wasn’t well established in cities until 1880ish or into the then much larger rural population in the 1910s. So starting 6ish generations ago and becoming widespread 3-ish generations ago.
In those days most people owned very little “stuff.” And if they got an item of stuff, they expected to keep using it for the rest of their life. The old motto was “Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do or do without.” Those people also didn’t have electricity, internal combustion engines, or much of anything not made mostly of wood plus a smidgen of metal or pottery. Life insurance hadn’t been invented, so when somebody died, the only good news was that suddenly a bunch of “stuff” became available to the younger relatives.
In other words, they lived on a planet utterly unlike our own.
It made sense for them to live in a way that fits with their circumstances. But if so it also makes sense that we live in a way that fits with our circumstances. Their ways aren’t better; merely different. Just as our ways would not suit their era, their ways do not necessarily suit ours.
Furniture is a functional item of interior décor. When it ceases to function OR ceases to fit your current needs and wants of décor, it’s outlived it’s usefulness (to you). Furniture not fitting your current décor wants is a “first world problem”. But that’s where we all live.