Tips For Dealing With Jewelry From An Estate
by Roberta Vasquez
After a loved one passes, you need to deal with numerous emotional and financial tasks. If your loved one has a lot of jewelry, you need to decide what to do with those items. Here are some tips to guide you along the way.
1. Identify Nostalgic Pieces
While dealing with an estate, it's easy to get distracted by the most financially valuable objects, but you may want to take some time to identify nostalgic pieces first. Then, you can give those items to the family members and friends who want them. To be as diplomatic as possible, you may want to have family members submit their requests on paper, and then you can accommodate as many requests as possible.
2. Repair Broken Estate Jewelry
To safeguard the value of your jewelry collection, you may want to find someone who specializes in estate jewelry repair services. They can repair individual pieces, or they may even offer you a quote on repairing the entire lot.
3. Compare Present and Pneumatic Values
Before repairing your jewelry, you may want to think about its value. In particular, you should compare the value of the jewelry in its current form and its pneumatic value. Also called melt value, pneumatic value refers to the value of the metal and jewels, beyond any value created by the artistic design of the piece.
For instance, a piece of cosmetic jewelry may derive its value from its style. In contrast, an outdated piece of jewelry that has plenty of gold and diamonds may have more value just from the gold and the diamonds rather than from the jewelry in its current form.
4. Think About Remounting Some Jewels
In some cases, you may want to remount some of the jewelry in the estate. In particular, if you feel nostalgic toward a certain piece but you don't like the style, you may want to consider remounting. An estate jewelry repair specialist may be able to help you with this step as well.
5. Clean and Polish for Sale
Finally, before putting your jewelry on sale, you may want to spend some time cleaning and polishing it. Even without doing a lot of repairs, polishing and cleaning can help to make the jewelry more attractive and sellable. To streamline the process, you may want to work with an estate sale professional or contact a consignment store who can display your jewels in exchange for a small commission if they sell.
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Hello, my name is Belinda. I spend my spare time making jewelry for my friends and family. The jewelry making process that I use closely mimics the practices utilized by the professionals. I have a small kit of tools that I use to bend wire, set stones and create other decorative elements for my jewelry. I want to explore hobby and professional tools used for jewelry making on this site. I hope that I can inspire other people to pick up this fun and rewarding hobby. I will share new jewelry industry information on this site as it develops. Please visit often to learn about this topic.