How to Evaluate Antique Furniture

Video Transcript

"So you're looking to evaluate an antique piece of furniture, and you're not quite sure if it's a reproduction or a real one. I'm Blake Kennedy with Kennedy Brothers Estate Services, and I'm here to help. Wondering if it's an antique piece of furniture and what it's worth and what kind of age it is is a tough question. The first that I do when I go into a house and decide if it's an antique piece of furniture, is I open up the drawer. This obviously is not an antique piece of furniture, this is from the fifties and sixties, but I always open it up and see the dovetails. The dovetails will tell you a lot if they're all nice and uniform like the way this is right here. That's a machine made piece, that's not an old piece because they cut it out a machine the same way that side, and the same way on this side. It's also put together with a lot of glue. So you want to make sure if you look at it and it's un-uniformed or it's only got three dovetails, that's what they call a hand-cut dovetail probably done in the eighteen-hundreds. And you also want to see the nails, if it's got square nail heads on it, that's indicative of the eighteen-hundreds an early piece. I also reach underneath the piece and I feel it to feel it to see if it's what they call hand chamfered, it'll be like on an angle where they had to chamfer it into the drawer. This one is not obviously because it's from the fifties and sixties. You also want to determine the type of wood that it is, if it's oak, if it's mahogany, walnut, those are all pieces that they used during the antique period, 'cause there was plenty of it. One thing that people forget about when they're looking at antique furniture, if you look at the top, the wider the piece of board on that antique furniture, the older the piece, because that means the tree was older, so when they cut it and spliced it, it's a wider piece of wood, so that right there looks - tells me this is an old piece of furniture, with an old piece of wood put on top of it. And sometimes they've used different woods on antique furniture. So make sure the first thing is look at the drawer, they'll tell you right away about what year it was done and you know, obviously if it has metal sliders on it, it's a reproduction piece, but it's not that difficult trying to tell an antique piece of furniture if you know the right places to look. I'm Blake Kennedy and I hope that helped."