Max, An 83-year-old widower from Liverpool, England decided it was time to sell his home and move to a smaller space. The former doctor planned to insulate the home’s loft in order to increase its market value, but first it needed to be cleaned out. Among the many items in the doctor’s storage were more than one hundred pieces of art, including twenty framed oil paintings and various drawings and etchings that were given to him when his mother passed away some twenty years earlier. When she died Max simply put the artwork in his loft and forgot about it. Little did he know that Erich Wolfsfeld, his step-father and creator of the artworks, was a well known and respected artist from WWII Germany.
Not knowing much about Wolfsfeld, Max had the art appraised and was surprised to find it worth more than $160,000. He contracted with an auction house to sell the work and will now have some extra cash to carry him through his twilight years.
Though finding treasures like this is rare, Max’s story is by no means unique. Finding things of value in an attic, basement, or garage is always possible when dealing with older properties. Consider the story a couple from Ferndale, Michigan:
Barb thought she heard water dripping in their home during the summer of 2003 and asked her husband Harley to take a look. Unable to find anything at first glance, Harley used a flashlight to look around in the floor joists above his head. Tucked into the rafters he found a small box that had gone unnoticed for the twenty years they had been living there.
The box, which belonged to Barb’s grandfather, contained more than 300 collectible cards originally packed with Sweet Caporal cigarettes. Among the collection were roughly 200 cards featuring baseball players from 1910, including several copies of Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson cards. The couple put the collection up for auction in 2005 after an appraisal that valued them at several thousand dollars.
There are plenty of other stories too, like the New Jersey man who found a 50-year-old inert hand grenade in the house he just purchased, or the Devon, England women who discovered a rare umbrella worth more than $28,000 during a spring cleaning.
Who knows what might be found in your home if you look hard enough. Maybe during your next cleaning project you’ll run across some old war artifacts, diamond rings, documents, or collectibles. Keep your eyes and mind open to that junk stored in the corner. It might be worth something.
Happy hunting!
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