Auction Catalog

Auction Catalog

Online Live Auctions and Your Perfect Antique

Searching online live auctions for a perfect antique for your collection is a fulfilling hobby. It is an exploration of your personal style and a way to connect to the past. Plus, they inspire our creativity. It helps us imagine an ancestor serving visitors on a silver tea service or a journalist pounding keys on a manual typewriter.

But do you use the tea service or do you keep it behind glass? Is the typewriter a way to stay in touch with your friends or does it decorate your office?

Where the antique fits depends on your point of view. But once you determine your point of view, you have automatically decided how much you are willing to bid at a live auction and how you will treat your perfect antique.

Family Heirlooms

Family heirlooms are self-explanatory. They could be the tea service mentioned above or a broken butter churn. The item's worth comes from the history given to it by the family. They are priceless because you would never consider selling them at live auctions or otherwise.

Nonetheless, patient and lucky bidders may be able to replace missing pieces of family heirlooms. For example, if a cup is missing from the tea service, it is possible that someone, somewhere, has a cup from the same set.

Weekend Projects

This is the antique that caught your imagination as soon as you saw its photo in the online auction catalog. It is battered and has little worth other than what you give it. The condition is so mediocre that sellers on live auction sites might not even bother with listing the age of the item.

After buying it for $25, you decide to make it fit into your house by updating it with a little sanding and some new paint. To you, its worth isn't in its age or connection to someone in the past, but rather comes from how much you bid online and its uniqueness. You love it because you've never seen anything like it. Or maybe you have and it reminds you of your childhood.

Either way, you don't think twice about turning it into a weekend project that you can work on with your kids.

A Thing of Beauty

Finally, there are antiques that capture you with their presence. Like family heirlooms, they have an aura of history. However, these antiques are in good condition and have the potential to become family heirlooms.

Bidding for these sorts of items can be stressful because we want them so much. Attending a live auction may only add to the stress, so buyers should look to see if the live auction has bidding online.

While we may spend our weekends researching the item or figuring out how best to show it off, any type of restoration or refinishing will be left to a professional.

Compared to weekend projects, these antiques will be more expensive. However, you might be surprised at the deals you can find once you start bidding online.

About the Author

Bid live online in upcoming live auctions at http://www.icollector.com. William J. Walberg is a freelance writer who writes articles in the auction and technology industries.

The Official Stargate Auctions: Presented by Propworx — Live Auction 1 Catalog