I’ll bet your grandma would say “Don’t feel guilty! Donate that vase somewhere.”
Well, you can’t plan on that, let alone mandate it.
I’d kept my comic collection intact to pass down…
I’ve taken a couple pieces of free furniture for the wood that I’ve used to create new pieces. I also got a bunch of solid wood shelves (the kind that go on wall mounted metal standards and brackets) from a government surplus sale…I still have some of that stock and it is great.
My 70 year old brother still lives in the family home, and he’s a hoarder. My mom before him was just starting down the hoarder road, too, so he inherited all her tchotchkes in 2007 and I’m sure they’re still in the house.
I’m estranged from him, but I’m sure that houseful of “heirlooms” is going to land in my lap at some point. There’s nothing in the whole place that I want so it’s going to be a whole lot of misery to deal with at some point when I’m old and unfit to cope with the mess.
No one can force you to take any of that crap. Unless there is a good reason, let someone else deal with it.
My parents downsized twice, the second time from a 1800 sq ft house to a two-bedroom apartment in a senior living facility. When that happened, we kids had the opportunity to take what we wanted. Everything else that wasn’t moved to the apartment was sold at an estate sale Worked out well
Surely after all these years on the Dope together you look on me as a daughter?? 
Seriously, I would love to get my hands on a usable treadle sewing machine, so if you really can’t persuade your daughter or granddaughter to take it, let me know!
I have some other family pieces that I’m happy with, though most of them are nothing special, but the only ones that burden my conscience at all are the handmade matching twin-bed quilts made by a great-great-aunt in the 1930s.
They’re really well made and in great condition, and I know a fair bit about their history and provenance, but I haven’t been able to find a quilt museum that wants them. They’re not that unusual in design, workmanship or fabric, and not old enough to be rare, but I can’t bring myself to just throw them on my own beds and let the wear and tear of ordinary use destroy them. It just seems as though they’d be perfect for some historic house or craft museum somewhere.
But isn’t that the reason they were made in the first place?
I’m related to quilt quazies, who go to quilt shows… where they’re all up on walls, covered with glass or Low-UV plexiglass.
It makes me sad, to think of the original quilter working on this beautiful quilt and imagining someone sleeping cozily underneath it.
I’m in bed right now underneath a handmade quilt that was bought cheap at a thrift store. We have several of them, and they make great bed spreads, dust covers, cat traps, etc. I hope the original maker is pleased it is being used as a blanket, after her ungrateful relatives got rid of it.
Yeah, and Neolithic potters made cups for people to drink out of. But if I found an actual Neolithic pottery drinking cup, I wouldn’t just stick it on the shelf with my other mugs and use it.
Of course, a 90-year-old set of quilts isn’t at all the same sort of thing as a 5-10K-year-old pottery artifact. And it’s always easy to make fun of people for treating any kind of use-designed objects as “too good to use”.
But like it or not, for every antique/ancient craft object and every owner, there is some tipping point somewhere at which the object starts to seem less important for its original function than for its historic and/or artistic significance.
You imagine that the original quilter however many decades or centuries ago would have been DISAPPOINTED to know that after however many years of somebody sleeping cozily underneath her quilt, it was considered still beautiful and valuable enough to be lovingly preserved and displayed as a historical art object? 
Then you clearly don’t know many actual quilters.
We like to have our creations enjoyed and used, even at the risk of ordinary wear and tear and eventual destruction, and we don’t like to have them shut away and never seen or appreciated. But that doesn’t mean we’re disappointed if an especially fine or rare item occasionally ends up being displayed and treasured as a work of art rather than a bedcover.
(And if the prizewinning quilt in question was made recently by a maker who CHOSE to submit it for consideration as an object of art, that makes any “sadness” about its fate even more nonsensical.)
Nothing wrong with that, either. It’s better to use or even abuse a handmade item than just leave it forever ignored.
My own issue with my great-great-aunt’s quilts is not that I think they should be preserved untouched, but rather that in my considered and not entirely uninformed opinion, they are worthy in themselves and in their history of being seen and appreciated by many more people than just me and my houseguests.
Some years back, when my mother got Internet access, she decided to go through that box of pictures people had sent her over the years in Christmas cards, etc., look up the people in them, and send them back. She couldn’t believe how appreciative quite a few of them were to get them, in addition to finding out that our family was doing OK, because they’d lost their pictures in a disaster of some kind or for some other reason just plain old didn’t have pictures of their kids at those ages.
One of my friends has told the story many times about cleaning out a relative’s house, and finding this set of 3 bud vases, all different sizes, that looked like they were a step up from a child’s craft project, and she was prepared to throw the butt-ugly things away when the person who was there to help with appraisals looked at them and (long story made short) said they were potentially worth as much as $4,000 at auction as a set, and offered her $200 in cash for that set. My friend happily took it because it was $200 more than she thought they were worth, that’s for sure.
I am so fortunate that my mother didn’t collect things. Even though we could afford it, she didn’t have “good” china or crystal. Her sterling flatware went to my sister and my sister gave it to her daughter in law. When Mom died, the furniture went into my brother’s garage. When said brother expired, his neighbor (with our permission) cleaned out the garage, donated what he could, hauled the rest to the city dump. I have a few pieces of original artwork that my mom bought (not Rembrandts or van Goghs). I have no children so when I die my niece and nephew get everything and they can do with it what they want,
I took my wedding china to Goodwill last week. Nice Lenox, but I don’t use it.
I thought that the definition of “heirloom” included the term “valuable”. Most of what is described in this thread is old pieces of furniture that people don’t really value but feel that they shouldn’t be discarded. To me that’s not an heirloom. That’s just impracticality at its finest.
My sister and by brother-in-law have turned their house into a borderline hoarders warehouse because they’ve taken on distant relatives furniture that no one else wanted as they have passed because they perceive it has some sort of value, even though they don’t put it to use. It’s stacked in various rooms throughout their home, based upon descriptions from my nephews and my mother. She hasn’t invited us to her house in over 15 years.
Okay, my mom also left us a sketch of 3 reclining figures, by Moore, valued at something like 20 grand. It’s ugly, and no one on the family wanted it. We gave it to a guy who’s putting it up to auction for us. He was a friend of my mom’s. Hopefully he doesn’t cheat us.
We squabbled a little over the some of the art that we liked, but none of those pieces were worth more than a couple hundred bucks, and some had no resale value.
Henry Moore is an extremely collectible British artist, his sculpture maybe even more so than his sketches and paintings. That is valuable. There are also a number of fakes and forgeries of his works as well. ???
Yeah, i don’t care for his sculpture, either. “We should try to sell this” was the obvious decision, given that it actually IS valuable and no one in the family wanted it.
But i kinda disagree with you about the meaning of heirloom. I think that’s something that’s valuable to the survivors because it’s been in the family a long time. Not something you can sell for a lot of money.
Heirloom apples are just old strains that are still being propagated, for instance.
Value is in the eye of the beholder. Many of the things described in this thread weren’t considered valuable in their intrinsic market value or the people the things were left to…so I dare say they are not heirlooms.
This is maybe my biggest dread connected to my parents’ deaths. I’ve joked that when it comes to their cabinet of Lladro figurines, I’m taking up skeet shooting. We have a few pieces (cabinets, clocks and the like) that date back to the 1800s, I guess I’ll try to find some antiques dealer to take them off my hands. Sadly, neither I nor either of my siblings would have any use for ancient, ugly-ass china sets.
I think sometimes the disconnect is between the perceived value and the actual value.
My current tale of unwanted heirloom is a complete set of 1950s Guardian Service aluminum cookware. It somehow ended up with me from a great aunt, after being passed around a few times among the cousins. I liked the aunt, but I have no sentimental attachment to the cookware.
It’s not good enough to put back into service—I have better pans. Yet, it’s not worthless enough to just dump in a scrap metal bin. Finally, it’s also not quite worth enough to bother selling.
Each individual piece is worth $20-50, with the whole set probably being worth about $300. That’s way to much money to throw away, but also not enough to be worth spending the time to research if selling it as a set or by piece is better, cleaning it and taking pictures, putting up an ad, boxing it up and shipping it off, and all that stuff.
My father had a long career as an Air Force pilot, and one of his most prized possessions was his 1945 flight school graduation ring. Dad had a long and fruitful life, and I never saw him without the ring until he insisted I take it shortly before his death. I spent some time in the Air Force and understand it meaning to him. But I would feel better if it was still with him.
That’s what Craigslist/Facebook Marketplace are for. List them for $20 or $30 as-is, maybe $10 off the total if some takes them all (so you don’t have to mess with multiple pickups).