I've had to struggle with my wife over some of the "antiques" that she's accumulated. I've tried to show her that the difference between "old" and "antique" is quality.

When my parents bought the house where I now live, they bought furniture. They believed that what was in the house should have higher value than the house itself, an attitude which has long gone away as U.S. homeowners have come to believe that their house is a "piggy bank" which they could refinance to extract perceived equity as the purported value of the property increased. My mother bought four chairs, a coffee table, and a sofa, each of which cost more than the house, which, in 1956, was newly built. Having recently attempted to buy quality furniture, as my wife didn't like the "Danish-Modern" style, which I like very much, in which my parents had furnished the living room, I learned that even quite costly furniture made in the U.S. today is of quality so poor that it makes it really unlikely that, even with a budget in the millions, one couldn't get furniture made as well as what was made back in the '50's. I pointed out defect after defect to the salespeople, who were quite chagrined that they had overlooked those obvious manufacturing flaws. Not one piece was precisely made, and fits were not in the 3-mil range as the old stuff I was replacing had, but more in the half-inch range.

My wife has protested bitterly when I've told her that the made-of-plywood and poorly constructed pieces that she'd accumulated over time would never be antiques. Because of the way in which they were built, they'd barely qualify as firewood. Naturally I didn't phrase things in quite that way.

We have "Antiques Roadshow" here, too. I was amused when an obviously "antique" piece of dining room furniture, which the owner had purchased for about $800 was revealed to have sold for $850000 at auction. I was further amused when a lady who had brought in a painting in a very interesting frame was told that the painting was of little value, but the frame was worth on the order of $10k. When they removed the painting from the frame, they found that the painting of negligible value covered a virtually priceless old-master, of which the owner had not even known.

RE