Are there hidden treasures in your self storage unit?

In 2010 a mother-and-son pair from Middlesex made headlines because of a vase they found while cleaning out the house of some elderly relatives who’d recently died.

Suspecting the vase might be valuable, they made enquiries with their local auctioneers, who told them it was an 18^th Century Qianlong-dynasty antique; when it was eventually put up for sale it became the subject of massive competition between nouveau-riche millionaire collectors from mainland China, and ended up selling for an astonishing £53 million.

This is an extraordinary example of the modern ‘cash in the attic’ phenomenon, when objects that were presumed to be worthless are found festering anonymously in people’s houses, only for it to turn out that they’re valuable.

Yet with people’s increasing habit of putting clutter they can’t bear to sort out in self storage units, rather than just in their attics, could there also be ‘cash in the self storage unit’ as well?

Cash in the self storage unit

The answer is that some self storage units may well have contents that are worth more than you’d think.

Items from certain periods rise in value during times when they’re in fashion. According to antiques expert Jonty Hearnden (a presenter on BBC1’s ‘Cash in the Attic’), the most popular items now are 20^th-century antiques and collectables, especially glass and ceramics from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, as well anything from the pre-War Art-Deco period.

Fortunately, these are exactly the sort of items that present-day households are likely to be putting in self storage, as many people are inheriting them from their parents and grandparents.

Chinese and other Asian items are also selling for very high prices at the moment, owing to the large numbers of Chinese collectors who’ve recently entered the market. This is shown in the example at the top of this article, and also by the fact that the most valuable items ever found by the Antiques Roadshow were a set of 26 Filipino watercolours auctioned in 1995.

Britain’s long colonial involvement in Hong Kong and the rest of this region means that many households used to collect Chinese antiquities, increasing the likelihood that objects of this nature might be discovered, particularly in self storage units containing items that have been passed down through families for several generations.

How to spot treasures hidden in self storage units

If you think your self storage unit might contain something of value, it’s worth dampening your expectations before you begin. The chances are it will turn out to be an imitation, or worth a lot less than you’d hoped. Most antique-hunters consider it a very good deal if something they bought for five pounds ends up selling for a hundred, so don’t go in expecting the nice vase you found in your self storage unit to fund your retirement, and you won’t be too disappointed if the result you get isn’t what you’d hoped.

To spot treasures in your self storage unit, you may need some expert help. For objects that have an interesting story attached to them it might be worth going on the Antiques Roadshow – it roves around the country from Spring to Autumn, and everyone who turns up on the day is usually guaranteed to see an expert (although you normally have to transport your treasure to the location yourself).

For the slightly less ambitious (or more realistic) antique-hunter, a standard book of advice within the industry is ‘Miller’s Antiques Handbook and Price-Guide’, which is available for £16 on Amazon, and gets updated in a new edition each year.

This comes fully illustrated with glossy photographs to help you identify your treasures, so if you took a copy of it down to the self storage centre and had a nose around your unit, it could be remarkable what you might find.

Decluttering may be the reward

In any case, investigating the value of objects is an excellent way of giving yourself an incentive to get rid of stuff: selling a room full of furniture that you don’t really want, even for a few hundred pounds at auction, is better financially than holding on to it for years in self storage.

Think of it more as a reward for decluttering than as a financial opportunity, and you’ll end up feeling pleased, whatever the outcome.

A final word of warning

One thing it’s very important to bear in mind is that your items must be in a sellable condition to get a good price. So look after them carefully when you put them into self storage. There’s nothing worse than finding you had a Ming vase that’s accidently been badly chipped, or a piece of Chippendale furniture with one of its legs missing.

The rest of the Storage.co.uk website contains lots of good information about how to store your objects in self storage, and there are specialist websites that explain how to look after especially valuable objects.

A good word of warning about keeping things in good condition comes from the Roald Dahl story ‘Parson’s Pleasure’, about an unscrupulous antiques dealer who pretended he was a country parson at weekends, and used this position to charm people into letting him see inside their homes.

He would then spy out any valuable items of furniture they had and offer to buy them at ludicrously low prices, claiming they were worth nothing. This worked, until the day he discovered an extremely rare Chippendale Commode in a remote farmhouse, and offered to buy it to use for firewood; however, the owners then took him at his word and chopped it to pieces while he went to get his car.

One Response to “Are there hidden treasures in your self storage unit?”

1. Mark says:

   July 19, 2011 at 9:51 pm

   Such a find is what makes buying antiques exciting, whether it’s rummaging through a shop or storage unit, or looking for online antiques.