One man had a unique chair worth way more than he could have imagined, and far more than the $700 he spent for it, on "Antiques Roadshow" (Mon., 8 p.m. ET on PBS). The man bought the chair along with several items for that $700 dollar price tag, and it proved to be hundreds of years old and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. What made it special was that it was a pre-plumbing toilet that was handcrafted and rather ornate. A cushion hid the hole in the center, and the appraiser said that often these types of chairs also had skirting around them to hide the bucket underneath. The appraiser guessed that the chair was made in New York and would fetch anywhere from $250,000-300,000 dollars, which the man calmly said he thought was "fantastic." See what shows up next on "Antiques Roadshow," Mondays at 8 p.m. ET on PBS. TV Replay scours the vast television landscape to find the most interesting, amusing, and, on a good day, amazing moments, and delivers them right to your browser.
HuffPost Entertainment is your one-stop shop for celebrity news, hilarious late-night bits, industry and awards coverage and more — sent right to your inbox six days a week.Top 10 Potty Chairs imagePotty training a child is an essential step in his or her development, as it teaches the child how to use the toilet and become more independent. Big, cold, and noisy toilets scare off many children, and...Read More about Top 10 Potty ChairsVintage PottyVintage BabyPotty ChairChair PaintedI Ve CreatedThings I VeBaby ThingsStenciledReadyForwardVintage potty chair, painted and stenciled and ready to be used. Do you think my potty chair has any significant value?The American furnituremaker Heywood-Wakefield Furniture Co. made this c. 1910 oak potty chair. It is a rococo revival–style armchair with carved motifs. Your example is from the company's San Francisco warehouse, which Heywood-Wakefield opened in 1876. Oak furniture isn't the most desirable in today's antiques market. This is especially true for oak potty chairs, which are basically old-fashioned toilets.
VALUE = $150*The estimates provided are preliminary only and subject to change based on firsthand inspection and further research. Appraisal prices refer to an item's fair market value, or what one might expect to pay for an object of similar age, size, color, and condition at auction. 8 Things Only Avid Antiquers Will Understand You Won't Believe What These 97 Amazing Antique Finds Are WorthWhat Is It Worth? What Is It Worth?: Americana Hail to the Chiefs Vintage New Year's Hats: What Is It? What Is It Worth? Silver Clutch: What Is It? Presidential China: What Is It? Television Set: What Is It? Vintage Simon & Garfunkel Record: What Is It? What Is It Worth?Legs EnamelEnamel LidPotty CommodeCommode ChairVictorian BedroomVictorian FurnitureLate VictorianFurniture MahoganyMahogany WoodForwardBeautiful piece of functional late victorian furniture. Mahogany Wood Chamber Pot, Potty, Commode Chair on turned legs Enamel pot with decorative enamel lid Novel ice/beer/wine bucket Ideal as a planter or bedside table (with storage) Budget ensuite, caravan!
Place A Classified Ad Place your Lost & Found, Pet, Garage Sale, Bargain Counter and Merchandise ads here. .Place your classified ad Details for Antique Childs Wooden Potty Chair Nice $10 336-3211 Antique Childs Wooden Potty Chair Nice $10 336-3211GUEST: I got it about 50 years ago, bought it up on the Hudson River, some antique shop, had it appraised in '82, and they couldn't say whether it was 100-- at that time-- 100-year-old chair or a 200-year-old chair. APPRAISER: A lot of people call these corner chairs. Museum catalogs often refer to this as a roundabout chair, and some citations in the South call it a smoking chair. Now, we both know something about this chair, that if I lift the seat up... we want to show everybody, okay? And what do we have there? GUEST: That's a potty chair. APPRAISER: It's a potty chair. Now, potty chairs tend to drop the value of anything. It tends to be worth a fraction of what the standard model is. So it's very important for us to look at this chair and decide when that piece of wood got in there.
APPRAISER: A lot of times, they had a skirt that would hide the pot, and what they would do then is cut the skirt off to make it a more appealing chair. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to tilt it up, and if you look here, you see these strips that are nailed in, and see these nails? These strips are slightly later. Not a lot, but just enough later that it lets me know they put the potty in later. And a lot of times, somebody couldn't leave the bedroom, and so they took an existing chair and just turned it into a potty chair. The other more important thing is when I look at these rails, there's no evidence whatsoever that they cut the rail to trim something to hide the pot. So, I'm very comfortable that it didn't start life as a potty chair with a deeper skirt. So that... to me, that's very, very important. Let me turn it back here. The fact that they converted it later doesn't really affect value. I love the legs. It's got four cabriole legs with ball-and-claw feet. That back leg is very unusual to be a cabriole leg.
Typically, it's a simpler leg than the other three. We've got a beautiful S-curve here, very nice, and a pierced splat with what they call the floating diamond. This does come from New York City. Very typical of the New York style when you look at the way the cabriole legs are done, look at the way the shell is done, and this pattern of splat specifically are all very typical of New York. The name that most often is associated with this type of splat is Gilbert Ash. Now, it's not signed, it's not labeled, and we can't prove it is Gilbert Ash. But if we were going to put up a candidate, he would be first on the list. APPRAISER: Do you remember how much you had to pay for it? GUEST: Well, I bought it with some other items at the time. I think it was about $750, $800. APPRAISER: When you had it appraised in 1982, what was the value then? GUEST: It was $6,800. But that was the appraiser that said he couldn't verify whether it was a 200-year-old chair or a 100-year-old chair.
APPRAISER: Well, you know, I would guess the finish, which is not the one we most want, was probably what threw him off. It's a really good chair. In a retail setting, this would be priced at around $250,000 to $300,000.That's really more than I had... APPRAISER: I hope so! Executive producer Marsha Bemko shares her tips for getting the most out of ANTIQUES ROADSHOW. The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends." Take note of the date the appraisal was recorded. This information appears in the upper left corner of the page, with the label "Appraised On." change over time according to market forces, so the current value of the item could be higher, lower, or the same as when our expert first appraised it.
Most of our experts will give appraisal values in context. For example, you'll often hear them say what an item is worth "at auction," or "retail," or "for insurance purposes" (replacement value). Retail prices are different from wholesale prices. Often an auctioneer will talk about what she knows best: the auction market. A shop owner will usually talk about what he knows best: the retail price he'd place on the object in his shop. there are no hard and fast rules, an object's auction price can often be half its retail value; yet for other objects, an auction price could be higherAs a rule, however, retail and insurance/replacement values are about the same. The values given by the experts on ANTIQUES ROADSHOW are considered "verbal approximations of value." Technically, an "appraisal" is a legal document, generally for insurance purposes, written by a qualified expert and paid for by the owner of the item. An appraisal usually involves an extensive amount of