My MIL is in a care home at the moment and we are slowly working our way through the boxes of crap that we removed from her house. Much of it goes to the dump or to charidee shops but there are a few things like commemorative coin sets that her late husband collected, which we need to sell. Unfortunately there are plenty of these special collectors' coins and sets on Eblag so the whole process is thoroughly disheartening.
I dread the day my own mother dies because she and my Dad use to "invest" in antiques and art, and now, years later, it turns out that they were misguided because this kind of stuff is only valuable if the artist happens to have become fashionable or the object is rare and in perfect condition. I sold a collection of their Victorian and Edwardian glassware to somebody for a tenner as it was all chipped and scratched. She keeps telling me we own a Turner, so last time I was there I checked and it's actually a lithograph of a Turner watercolour, worth probably a pound. God knows how much they paid for it.
As a footnote, I did once achieve something useful with an old family heirloom; when my FIL died he left a beautiful Victorian bible, which had collapsed under its own weight and was disintegrating. My MIL didn't want it so I had a wheeze; in Ramsbottom near my home I found a well-known restorer of Victorian books and bibles so I persuaded my employer to bung £100 to my MIL then to pay £180 to get the bible restored and then I gave it as a gift to a very good Nigerian customer who is an extremely devout Catholic and has a chapel in his home. He was thrilled to bits with the bible, especially when I told him the kid leather for the cover came originally from goats in northern Nigeria. That's true, by the way!
