The Bishan Intercity Real Estate & Housing Committee(BIRHC)

Bishan Real Estate Development & Property Management Resources

Antiques for Your Home

Thinking of renovating or upgrading the interiors of your home? It's pretty common to "dress up" your house, especially if you are thinking of transferring from an old place to a new home. One quick suggestion: Antiques.

Antiques are expensive. Antiques are high maintenance. Antiques are a very challenging stuff to deal with at home. The slightest mistake can do so much damage not only to the look of your antique but to its price as well. Managing real estate property that has antique furnishings are valued at a much higher price.

These items are prized for being old and for looking old. To discover the secret to achieve that is priceless. If you choose to go for antiques to furnish and decorate your home, there may be a lot of things you should do and should not do to preserve their “antiqueness”.

Perhaps the first thing that you should remember when it comes to putting antiques at home – whether they are antique seats and couches, grandfather’s clocks, ceramics, or china, these things are not child-proof nor pet-proof. If you have toddlers and little children at home, your antiques are perpetually under threat of bumps, scratches, or breaking. And you can’t fully childproof them. They don’t mix with crayons and hand paints and basketballs.

Certainly, they can never be in the same room as dogs and cats. Especially wooden antiques, the slightest scratch can do so much damage. You can’t re-polish or repaint them either as they lose their ‘genuine antique’ value over the slightest alteration.
 
Another thing that causes most damage to antiques is direct exposure to sunlight, too much moisture in the area, and/or too close to heat in fireplaces, stoves, etc. They can cause discoloration, disfigurement, and other clear damages. Especially books and old art pieces, even the mere oxygen levels at home can affect its condition so you would have to be careful about where you place them. Temperature and lighting are very important factors so it may be a challenge to display and preserve them all at once. For more tips on how to take care of your wooden antique furniture, this Yahoo! article is pretty useful.

Also, these antiques are very much prone to insect infestation. Your old couches could be home to bedbugs or other mites and may even promote mold infestation. There also are the perpetually threatening termites. You’ll never know when and how they strike and since you cannot do so much chemical treatments on your antique furniture, you might have to do something else to protect it.

Putting antiques at home may also require you to create special cases for them. For example, some fine china tea set cannot simply sit with the rest of your kitchen items. They have to be placed in a special cabinet or display shelf where they are best-protected from both dust and risks of falling and breaking.

Moving the antiques around is tricky too. Since these antiques are very old, they are likely to be very volatile too. The smallest items are always the most delicate like antique manuscripts, photographs, cutlery, etc. Even a fingerprint could ruin it so you have to be more than extra careful. Moving around the bigger ones in a room is a challenge too since you can’t just push and pull them around nor trust it to carry its own weight.

Antiques around the house are a good investment and could even increase your home’s value both financially and aesthetically. But it requires a certain degree of responsibility.