Tips for Buying Furniture and Antiques at a House Contents Sale

If you arrived here after searching for a furniture auction near you, we should be straight with you before you read any further. A house contents sale is not an auction. There is no bidding, no hammer, no buyer's premium and no waiting to find out whether you won. Everything carries a price on a sticker and you either pay it or you do not.

We say so up front because the buyer is usually the same person. Anyone trawling local salerooms for a decent dining table wants what contents sale buyers want: real timber, for a fraction of what it costs new. What changes is how you buy it, and what you should check first.

Fixed price and bidding, side by side

Neither format is better in the abstract. They suit different buyers and, more to the point, different items.

The practical consequence is that contents sales are strongest exactly where auctions are weakest. An auctioneer will happily catalogue a Georgian bureau and will lot the rest of a bedroom as "a quantity of household furniture". At a contents sale the wardrobe, the bedside tables, the mirror and the ottoman are each priced individually. We have compared the formats in more depth in local auction houses against house contents sales and in house clearance auctions against house contents sales.

The checks worth doing in the room

This is the real advantage of the format, so use it. You are standing in front of the piece with your hands on it and nobody is rushing you to bid. Five minutes of looking will tell you most of what you need to know.

Solid timber or veneer

Neither is a fault, but they are worth very different money. Look at the edges and the end grain: on solid timber the grain pattern runs over the edge and continues on the adjacent face, while a veneer stops at a thin line and often has a strip of edging over it. Check the underside of a table top and the sides of a drawer, which are rarely finished as carefully as the front. A chipped corner showing a pale, uniform, biscuit coloured core means chipboard or MDF underneath.

Woodworm, and whether it is still alive

Small round holes in older furniture are extremely common and are not automatically a reason to walk away. The question is whether the infestation is active. Old, historic damage shows holes with dark, worn, dirty edges and no dust. Active woodworm shows sharp, pale, clean edged holes and fine powdery frass that looks like sawdust, often on the floor beneath the piece or on the shelf below. Run a finger under it, then tap the piece over a dark surface and see what falls out. Beetles emerge roughly between May and October, so fresh dust in summer is the stronger signal. If you buy anything with holes at all, keep it away from your other timber furniture until you are satisfied.

How it is put together

Pull a drawer right out and look at the corners. Dovetails, hand cut or machine cut, tell you it was built to last and can be repaired. Staples, plastic blocks and cam lock fittings tell you it was built to be sold. Look at the back panel too: solid or ply and screwed on is a good sign, thin hardboard pinned on is not. Then put your weight on it. A joint that has loosened can usually be reglued, but a split rail or a cracked chair leg is somebody's project rather than a bargain.

Upholstery and the fire label

Upholstered furniture in the UK is covered by the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988, and compliant pieces carry a permanent label, usually stitched under a cushion or behind a loose cover, carrying the wording about carelessness causing fire. Look for it before you buy any upholstery. Pieces made before 1950 sit outside those regulations entirely, so a genuinely old chair will not have one, which is different from a 1990s suite that has had its label cut off. Beyond the label, press hard on each seat to feel for a broken frame or a failed spring, and use your nose. Damp and smoke are both very difficult to get out of a filling.

Measure before you commit, not after

Bring a tape measure and have your own numbers already in your phone: the alcove, the doorway, the turn at the top of the stairs, the boot with the seats down. Then measure the piece, including its depth with the doors open, and ask whether it comes apart, because most wardrobes and many beds do. The most expensive furniture mistake at a sale is not overpaying, it is buying something that will not go into the room you bought it for.

What tends to be good value, and what does not

Value at a contents sale follows difficulty. The harder something is to shift, the better the price tends to be, because the seller has a house to empty and a date to do it by.

• Usually good value: wardrobes and chests, dining tables and chairs, bookcases, solid pine and mid century teak, garden furniture, tools and ladders, mirrors, rugs, and full sets of anything.
• Sells fast, go early: anything photogenic, anything with a recognised maker, small mid century pieces, and anything that fits in a hatchback.
• Often overpriced: mass produced modern furniture, mahogany reproduction of the 1980s and 1990s, and pieces the family has an emotional attachment to.
• Think twice: upholstery with no label and an unclear history, anything with active woodworm, and any piece needing specialist restoration you are not going to do.

The best value in most houses is the thing nobody photographed. Everyone leaves with the mid century sideboard. Almost nobody leaves with the extending ladder.

Antiques: what a contents sale can and cannot do for you

Contents sales throw up genuinely good older pieces, because they sell whole households and older households own older things. What they do not do is authenticate. Nobody will confirm a maker, date a piece or give you a provenance, and a sticker price is not a valuation. If you know what you are looking at, that gap is the opportunity. If you do not, treat everything as being worth exactly what you would pay to own it, which is a healthier way to buy anyway.

The honest scoping runs the other way too. If you are hunting one specific rare thing, a signed piece or a named maker, a specialist auction will serve you far better, because that is where those items get deliberately sent and where the people who want them are already looking. A general contents sale is a place for people who like looking, not a place to fill a gap in a collection to order. How the prices get set in the first place, including why the judgement varies from house to house, is covered in how items are priced and what is on the sticker.

Every sale is listed with photographs and a video walkthrough of the rooms, so you can see the furniture before you decide whether it is worth the journey. Browse the upcoming sales and have a look at what is in the houses near you.

Common questions

Can I bid on furniture at a house contents sale?

No. Every piece carries a fixed price and the first person to pay for it takes it. If bidding is the part you enjoy, an auction house is genuinely the better afternoon and we would not pretend otherwise.

Will I have to pay a buyer's premium?

There is no premium added to a sticker price. That is one of the clearer practical differences from an auction, where the amount you pay and the amount that gets bid are two different numbers.

How do I get a wardrobe home?

You arrange it, and you arrange it the same day. There is no delivery service, no collection date and no loading bay, because the sale is in a house. Plenty of buyers book a van for the afternoon of a sale they have high hopes for. The practicalities are in attending your first house contents sale.

Do furniture prices come down during the sale?

Large furniture is often the first thing to be reduced late in a sale window, precisely because it is hardest to move. That is a real opportunity if you have the transport, and we have set out the trade-off in how late sale reductions work.

Can I return something that turns out to be damaged?

Assume not. Secondhand items are sold as seen, which is exactly why the format lets you spend as long as you like inspecting them first. Look properly, and if you are unsure, do not buy it.

Is it worth going if I only want one thing?

Yes, if you have seen it in the listing photos, and you should book an early slot. If you are browsing rather than hunting, go later and take a bigger car. The format itself is explained end to end in what a house contents sale is and how it works.