Dear Lee,

A smart collector will make records of where things were bought and what was paid, store original boxes, save provenance information, keep things away from dirt, heat, sunlight, cold, dampness—the list goes on and on. But most collectors don’t think about what to do if something is damaged.

It all began with a warped door on a large Victorian sideboard. At last, I decided to have our damaged pieces restored in case I wanted to sell some if I move. It gave me a lesson in the cost of carelessness. My inventory of problems showed a missing wooden knob on a Victorian table and several missing pieces of veneer from a Carleton desk. Our Victorian bed started losing pieces of wooden trim because the glue had dried. An Empire chest with inlay and metal trim lost pieces on one side. I have no idea when the pieces were damaged. But I do remember putting my mother’s lamp on the floor to clean, bumping it and watching the Sevres porcelain urn break into three big pieces. And, most annoying of all, once I dropped a Jensen silver teaspoon into the garbage disposal where it was mangled and gouged. Although I saved the spoon, the knob, the wooden trim, the broken pieces of the Sevres lamp, and other strange bits of wood and nails that seem to be from antiques, I don’t have the missing veneer from the desk. It was probably “cleaned” off when I wasn’t there.

So I called the best in town—a firm that does museum quality restoration, for an estimate. The warped door and its missing trim will be about $1,300. The bump damage, missing trim plus fixing loose parts on the table is about $1,100. Since the pieces are museum quality we think it will pay to get a perfect repair. But we decided to find a good cabinet maker to re-glue all the other pieces of trim in the bedroom and to replace the small pieces of veneer. The Sevres lamp pieces will stay in a box to be fixed if one of my grandchildren thinks it would be “cool” to have great-grandma’s lamp. And I sold the silver spoon as scrap silver.

Get a plastic bag or box, keep it near your antique furniture and when you find a broken part save it in the bag. That includes nails, screws, broken ceramics, wood and metal. Have expensive pieces fixed by experts, less expensive by talented restorers. Sometimes you can do simple repairs like re-gluing. The money spent on restoration will raise the price of the piece when you or your heirs sell it. And you can again admire your antiques.