How Long Does One Keep Furniture?

My parents went out as newlyweds in 1958 and bought solid oak furniture, then used it through the time my mother passed away in 2022.  It's all still sitting in the Old Man’s house in 2024 as he “maybe” gets ready for an estate sale and downsizing: coffee table, end tables, bedroom suite…

That’s 66 years of using the same furniture, two thirds of a century.  Now these aren’t and will never will be antiques.  They were sold to yuppy-equivalents in the late 1950s at department stores like Macy’s.

One way to think about this furniture is sentimental, as there are decades of family pictures with them in the background, mostly Christmases and Thanksgivings, sitting there as silent witnesses to the growing up and leaving of the kids, the aging of the couple who bought them, the death of one of the buyers after six decades, and soon the second.

But instead of being sentimental about it, seeing these pieces actually makes me a bit angry.  “Why didn’t my parents ever update their furniture? Were they cheap or is it a depression-era generational thing?”.  “Did they not pay attention to evolving tastes and styles?”.  “Modern furniture is not that expensive, why did they hang on to it?”, and so on.

So to be fair to them I wandered around my house and figured out the ages of all my furniture, wondering what was the oldest piece I own.   But I am not a good comparison since I got divorced not once, but twice, so started over with nothing at 30 then almost nothing again at 40.   The second time I did end up with my nice home-office desk I had bought a few years before, which as the only worldly possession I owned after the second divorce, I could say it’s a $250,000 desk.   It is now the the oldest piece of furniture I own: 20 years old.

But I won’t have it much longer.  When I retire in a few years I plan to walk out of my current house with some clothes and start over again at 60 (but keep the wife and bank accounts this time).  I will be downsizing and moving to another state, and there is no reason to haul any of my current furniture with me.  If I am lucky that will be the last time I start over, but if not, then I will walk away with nothing yet again for the last time in a few more decades, checking into some furnished care facility at the very end.

I just have a different mindset about furniture so shouldn’t be too hard on my parents about keeping the same pieces all their lives, but it still bothers me a bit every time I walk into that house and see furniture that was already old and out of date and I hated when I was kid.