Dear Lee,

Winter is over, flowers are blooming and spring cleaning has begun. But some collectors seem to put off the cleaning for a long time-so long that others cash in on some unexpected treasures.

In the 19th century a few talented women made Baltimore album quilts. Most were made of appliquéd blocks of red, green, blue, and yellow pieces arranged as baskets of flowers, eagles, wreaths, buildings, or ships. These time-consuming quilts were the inspiration for a 19th-century bed cloth discovered in a drawer where it had been avoiding spring cleaning for most of the last century. Although is was not a quilt, but a water color painting on cloth that resembled an album quilt, it excited the folk art collectors and sold at auction for $231,000.

A woman who left a painting wrapped in a blanket in her garage for over 60 years finally got around to having a garage sale and sold it for $5. The buyer hung it in the kitchen, but decided last year to see if the artist, Joseph Decker was known. It turned out he was an important 19th-century German-American artist. The buyer sold Decker’s garage-sale painting of pears to The National Gallery of Art for $1 million. Too bad the lady doing spring cleaning didn’t do some research.

A friend was helping her mother clean last month and found a dusty flower vase in her mother’s laundry room cabinet. We told her it was a Rookwood Pottery vase from the 1930s made by Shirayamadani and worth thousands of dollars. Our friend took the old crushed chicken wire and dry flower stems out of the vase and convinced her mother it belonged in the living room. Her mother thought it was “just an old vase” and she wanted her daughter to take it if she liked it. So clean the forgotten drawers, laundry cupboards and garages carefully. You might have a treasure.