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How many times have you heard the old proverb spoken: “One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”
Customers stopping into Oldies from the Estate will find plenty of “treasures,” notes Bill Wallace, who along with his wife, Beth, owns the Indian Orchard, Massachusetts shop they established back in 1995.
What Oldies from the Estate does today is to buy and sell items from the homes of people who are either moving and can’t or don’t want to take everything with them, or who just want to get rid of a few things.
“Knowing that moving or being faced with going through and cleaning out a deceased loved one’s home can be extremely stressful for a person, we can sometimes help. It could be by purchasing items we can turn a profit on, or help them to a find a home from other items that are not saleable for us because of their condition or need at the moment,” Beth said.
The idea for Oldies from the Estate dates back to when Bill was a youngster of no more than age 4 or 5 living in Springfield. He would often accompany his grandmother who was a house cleaner for wealthier people in the area. He just didn’t realize at the time where his inquisitiveness would lead one day.
“I would look at things in these homes that interested me and ask my grandmother questions about them. But life gets ahead of you and I went on as an adult to a career as a mechanic while my wife worked for the phone company,” he said.
Then retirement loomed for the couple and Bill began to remember his love and interest for many of the items he once saw as a child, many of which were already antiques or now years later qualify as antiques. Antiques must be at least 100 years old, while pieces over 50 years old but less than 100 years are considered to be vintage or
collectible.
“To tell a funny story, I looked at my wife one day and asked, ‘Would you mind selling some things for us?’ She didn’t really know what I was talking about, to which I answered, ‘Perfect.’ We then had to scrape up a few nickels to rent a store down the street from us,” Bill said.
Now faced with an empty shop, he began attending local auctions and traveled as far as Maine, Vermont and the Canadian border to find and bring back things he thought “looked cool” to sell in the store.
“I would go to the boonies to buy super high-end pieces in New York and dealers, especially, could hardly wait to see what I would return with,” Bill said.
Eventually, he stopped going to auctions to focus more on purchasing goods out of people’s homes.
“Auctions can be quite stressful with everyone trying to outbid one another, sometimes resulting in paying more for that item than you might end up selling it for in the store. It is more pleasing and friendly to be one-on-one with customers in the privacy of their own homes. And what is good about that is you often get a history about the goods you are buying,” Beth said.
Today, if you were to take the alphabet from A-Z, Beth said she could “pretty much name something for each letter” to be found in the store.
As for furniture, customers will find a mixed assortment of various styles and makes, “just as you might have in your home,” Beth noted, including beds, dressers, side tables, coffee tables, chairs, wooden cabinets used to display books, trophies, artwork, china, or other items someone might collect, or wooden pedestals which might
be used to place a large vase or other item on.
Other “treasures” to be found include art to decorate a wall, lamps, toys, costume jewelry, dolls, musical instruments, vinyl records, coins, sterling silver, oldfashioned door knobs and ice crem scoops, car parts such as old hubcaps and other accessories you might find in vintage cars, signs, outdoor items such as statuary, and farm items such as pitch forks, hoes, and other hand tools, milk cans, corn shuckers, butter churns, plows…the list is endless.
Along the way, the couple, both 70, has come upon a few unique items to add to their store’s collection, including some rare buggies, sleighs and authentic Western-style stagecoaches from way back when from a house in Connecticut, telephone booths, and even a porcelain autopsy table that eventually made its way to a museum.
Bill said he “still cannot believe” how many people tell him they were driving by, saw the store, and didn’t realize it was there.
“Sometimes when they see our name, Oldies from the Estate, they immediately think of antiques and are under the impression that they can’t afford what’s inside. But, as antiques go, they are at the lowest price they have ever been,” Beth said.
“We had a woman stop in who was going to be a grandmother for the first time. Both of her daughters were pregnant and due just a few months apart. She found a rocking chair and another child’s chair and between both paid about $50 telling me, ‘Oh my God, your prices are great.’ We are here to sell, not to look at everything in the store. If it sits too long, your profit margin is gone. We need to move our items and try very hard to be fair in our pricing. As long as we can make a few dollars over what we paid for something from someone’s home, we’re happy to move it along,” she added.
Bill cautioned against buying anything as an investment.
“I say save your money for the stock market. The worst thing you can do is to purchase something as a collectible. I hear over and over from older folks that they are keeping things for the future. Take Hummels, for example. These porcelain figurines from Germany became especially popular after World War II and were collected by many people. Today they have gone the way of the wind and a younger generation has no interest in buying them. So, when you hear the word collectible from someone, I consider the word a marketing tool and you should run the other way,” he said.
Beth agrees.
“You buy something because you will use it, enjoy it and not think that down the road you can cash in on it. The market changes so much in this business that you can’t guarantee something’s future worth,” she added.
OLDIES FROM THE ESTATE IS LOCATED AT 45 PARKER STREET IN INDIAN ORCHARD, MA
HOURS ARE TUESDAY THROUGH FRIDAY FROM 10 A.M. TO 4:30 PM. AND SATURDAY FROM 10 A.M. TO 2:30 P.M.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, CALL (413) 543-6065 OR VISIT THEM ON FACEBOOK OR EBAY.
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