Im dealing with boxing up my moms stuff as we prepare her house for sale. my sister has said I can either keep some or we can sell off the glassware and dinnerware and so on. you know, everyone’s favorite thing to do with your parents old stuff. anyway…
there are several glassware collections that she squired over the years, some I think were even her grandmothers from the late 1890’s. is there anyway to see if they have any value, besides sentimental value. Or do I just keep them as more of display purposes as some of them, while very nice to look at, Im not sure I would really want to drink from them. you know, the ones with the gold rim that were in fashion in the 60’s and 70s. others are very heavy thick Waterford glasses in the royal family kind of fashion (sorry, ive been watching The Crown lately) I could post pictures of some if seeing them interests anyone.
its not like I don’t already have too many wine glasses (like its really possible to have too many) but making these small decisions when dealing with the chaos that im in right now, makes my brain freeze and crave a nice bottle of wine.
I doubt there’s any market. I faced the same issue with my parents’ fancy china – three sets in all. That ended up at consignment shops. I’m not sure any of it ever sold.
Ask my sister. Every family has someone who is an expert in going to yard sales and buying other people’s junk. In my family, it is my sister. But my opinion is that it is not worth the trouble. We have a set of China that belonged to my wife’s grandmother. It sits in our dish closet taking up space. My wife alleges that we used it about 30 years ago. I doubt it. I think its only use, other than sentimental value, was as an excuse to complain when I broke a tea cup when I dropped something on it in the dish closet. AND if you think it’s weird that we have a closet just for dishes, you get the point.
I’d say keep them if you have the space and would like to use them a few times per year otherwise offer them to other family members or sell them.
I inherited a bunch of Waterford glasses along with some nice china and silver. The Waterford looks great now that we have a nice cabinet to display them. The china and silver get used a few times per year for holiday dinners. I use the Waterford a little more as it’s fun on occasion to have the matching beverage out of a designated whiskey, port, sherry, champagne, or cordial glass.
For me I wouldn’t have kept them unless I had the space to store them and occasionally used them. Fortunately I hung on to them because one daughter wants the Waterford (she likes wine but is not serious about it but likes the bling and it has sentimental value to her) and another wants the china/silver. Wanting that stuff is unusual for the millennials I hear.
“I inherited a lot of strangely shaped stemware marked ‘Riedel’ and ‘Zalto’ when my parents died. No one seems to use this stuff anymore. People just drink beer or cocktails. These days if they drink wine, it’s from a bag with a straw. Do you think there’s any market for these glasses? Or should I just keep them for display?”
I am intrigued by how the fashion has changed fro heavy cut lead crystal (which can be visually striking with the right wines) to super plain ultra thin ‘crystal’.
PSA re old crystal: while it’s ~fine to pour a drink into a lead crystal glass and drink it over the course of an hour or two, it’s apparently a bad idea to e.g. pour a bottle of whiskey into a lead crystal decanter and just leave it there til finally consumed. The lead leaches at a rate that you’ll wind up ingesting more than is advisable. (This is what I gathered from internet research after inheriting old crystal decanters - the many docs on this board can correct me if I’m wrong!)
fwiw I kept my grandmothers beautiful (but unusable for purpose) wine glasses and for many years used them as dessert glasses. I did that until Arnold accidentally broke one and insisted in putting them on display in a glass case where they would be safe and he wouldn’t feel guilty.
We have our set of china and silver, my mother’s set of silver, my grandmother’s set of silver, my mom’s set of Steuben glassware, and I think we used our china 30 years ago twice. We don’t use the silver because I understand you shouldn’t put it in the dishwasher.
Our daughters have no interest in any of it. If we don’t even use it, why would they?
Times have changed.
yeh, luckily they suffer a quick death. but for some reason I suffer the death of every single one, for too long sometimes and overthink their cause of death more than i should.
being a single guy with kids out of the house, there will be plenty of place to display them in the china cabinet. like mentioned above, if the fine china gets used 4 times in my lifetime, that would be a lot. but all the old glassware and china is nice to look at.
