Our most historic finds from the past 5 years have to go!... I gear up for a very special Auction!

hi i'm alex archbull and i've been buying and selling antiques since i was 9 years old from basements to scrap yards i'll look just about anywhere i can to find lost antiques and collectibles and sometimes i'll go big and buy everything with my wife and kids we run an antique shop in edmonton alberta canada filled with some of the most unique items we can find i never know what's going to happen or who i'm going to meet this is our life this is our adventure and this is curiosity inc from home honey [Music] okay everyone i have decided to start listing a whole bunch of stuff at auction um i'm gonna be working around the store today trying to get things cleaned up and organized we have some new orders and deliveries coming in for new stock but i have a pile of cool rare artifacts and it's time for them to go why am i doing all this well i'm a business and it's good to turn your stock over but more important than that melissa and i are gonna save up and hopefully get ourselves some kind of acreage or property with a workshop because i'm out of room at my own house i'm gonna head in today i'm gonna do a little search and find some of the coolest artifacts i've collected in the last few years to take him to auction for april let's go see what we're going to put through now the one thing that i want to be careful of is not to make my store void of any character whatsoever so i want to make sure there's still a few really good key pieces around for us to have on display but um that all said i've got tons of showcases full of stuff um that are unique interesting and sometimes very historic and i think this is the time that we do a big historic auction sale and i'm gonna start off with a lot of the mayan artifacts um some ancient indigenous artifacts some artwork uh antique firearms oh boy the list is gonna be big but i better quit talking and start picking one of the first things that i'll probably put through i've been cult revolver and it has an early cartridge conversion done in the late 1800s which is common around that time um we also have a pepper box with an ivory handle of the dragoon model with the long barrel on it and this is kind of unique because the entire barrel road rotates very very early six shooter this would date to the i think what this is 1837 or so but everything's gonna go up no reserve in fact when i was at the uh metropolitan museum they had one like this and it wasn't nearly it was nice as the one i have uh i think yeah this is a 1837 patent really really cool piece pick that up on the east coast uh went to a guy's house and asked if he had any old firearms around and he pulled this out of a cigar box you never know what somebody's got kicking around there's also this this is an actual flintlock patterson dublin 50 caliber circa 18 10 to 20. beautiful shape beautiful shape so that one's gonna go uh and i picked this up off of a local gun collector years ago well a couple years ago this is uh like your full-on pirate gun right there this is a um algerian i believe um like a boarding gun and i can't say for certain that a pirate used it but this is the sort of fancy thing that they would have had with all this inlay all this mother of pearl and fine sort of work in here really interesting piece really early flint lock uh nice brass uh detail on it what a cool thing um so there's a few already right off the bat i don't know the exact manufacture of this conversion that was done on is the original uh barrel on there and everything but they did conversions like this in the 1870s or so um so this is a model 1851 and uh yeah they did in the early 1870s they were doing conversions on them like this uh to take a different style of bullet as the you know the antiquated style was uh was going out but i don't know what the maker was on it it is about as old as this gun just about and it's nice bluing on it still rare piece good early piece nice piece of history that'll be going up for auction the other thing i have that's kind of cool is i have a pair of books it's a two volume set it's the conquest of alexander the great it's in french uh in the year if you look at this uh m is one so that's one thousand five so sixteen hundred and eighty so this is from the year 1680. um what a neat piece and what a nice little set of antique books uh this was brought into us that came out of actually a um i had been in a hutterite family for hundreds of years in a barn and made its way into my shop and now they're gonna be going off to auction here i am and this is how it always goes i'm just clearing stuff out and getting things ready for auction sale um and then what comes in more stuff but this time it's lego um so a gentleman brought in his kid's old lego sets because they didn't want them anymore and uh they're look like they put them together and never really took them apart so there's the gray castle there i had that when i was a kid i remember that had little drawbridge that went down many hours of play with that and this was the slightly earlier the yellow castle which is the first lego castle i think they ever did again looks like it's all complete with all the nights um lego is fairly collectible so i'm gonna go through this stuff here throughout the day and set it up on the shelves and by the end of the day i will show you what i was able to come across and uh in terms of complete sets and you know hopefully there's gonna be a few little gems in here as i continue to gather things up for the auction like these beautiful west coast salish style baskets uh a gourd that is labeled is coming from barter island off the coast of alaska i'm also finding some other things like this this is an 1898 newspaper called the petite journal and you can see on the front what's happening the police are beating up some bikers because bikers were a different sort of thing back in the old day highs say yeah they're up for a bike ride who knows what they got into but there's a bicycle riot it looks like in the the police have greatly outnumbered these two bicyclists who don't look very happy about what's happening i'm sure you can read all about that if you purchase this newspaper items are falling into place to get ready for auction and i'm starting to get some of the lego sets up it looks like they're fairly complete i'll have to move the guys that don't belong here like this little guy i believe belongs to that set the earlier guys had the little chest plates kind of like that down there on them um there's a really old police station in fact a couple police stations but what was uh even more cool is that as i'm digging through these boxes of lego i see there's a whole box of space stuff in here so i might have to take this stuff home and make sure it's all together and we have all the right pieces for it but this is a pretty good hall of lego so i'm going to set this side in the car the tough job tonight of playing with lego boy it's a tough job being an antique store owner but somebody's got to do it as i'm going through some of the things i've had piled up behind the counter i had the stack of books and what are they you might ask well they are music books if you look they're marked mr kemp who i'm guessing was in an orchestra it's his first violin when you open it up you can see that it's really old because they are pressed block this is a really early form of printing price so you know that you're looking at an old book when you see that little indentation i've only ever seen that in books from the 1700s or early 1800s but then it kind of died off so to get an idea of the age of this book sometimes you'll find roman numerals it's in english which is nice so it's um symphonies composed by mozart um and it's from london published by manzani and hill music sellers to his royal highness the prince regent that refers to king george iv who died in the early 1800s this book is likely from the late 1700s which means that it was around when mozart was still alive this is contemporary music of that time so this is original mozart um music notes music books that were adapted at that time and they were um yeah from the time of uh king george iv so this would be original mozart music that i've got just sitting around my shop i don't know that i'll put these through auction because i think that's gonna be a specialty seller on something like that but how cool is that when you find some real treasures in your own store some of the things i have in the showcases are actually quite rare um this in particular found this in the basement of an old bookseller's house uh years ago now it's one of the only known coffees and so obviously it has a very high price point it's gonna be going up no reserve at auction which is scary but this is um from the 1800s it is a original it's a 18 what 1883 1833 i can't recall exactly but it's the translation of the lost tutelo tribe so it's an original translation signed by horatio hill the guy who wrote it and boy oh boy is it ever something neat look it says there this one was to the reverend james roy with compliments of horatio hale so obviously uh perhaps a missionary or somebody got this um the tutela tribe no longer exists that's something that is a real piece of history and you know you hope it finds a good home with its new uh new bidders um so i guess these items will go off to auction with some of these crystal points egyptian seal i don't know i'm gonna i'm trying to pick all the stuff that i think is really cool or unique from around the store or things that came from the reynolds collection to go so i'll keep at it and finding things to put in the sale so far things are going well i am nearly halfway to my goal of another 250 items to inventory over today or tomorrow uh and i found this little gem here too this if you don't recognize it is a coal miners cap now oftentimes you find the little torch the lamp and shoot little flame out with the front that's probably not the safest thing to have a coal mine but that's what they used um but you never find the hat to go along with it look at that this uh was found inside the wall of a house one of my customers came in and he said i found this inside the wall we were renovating are you interested i said sure i am how cool is this oh that's another little gem that can go up for this auction starting to find some really cool artifacts around the store i hope it's not going to be disappointing sale actually i know it's not going to be it's gonna be so much cool stuff i would go to the sale if i wasn't the guy selling it but gotta keep looking for more well first day of putting stuff aside has gone well i have everything from ancient masks to muskets you know world war ii items old swords banff i don't know um who exactly my target market is for this stuff maybe mr peanut um but hopefully whoever it is gonna find some really cool artifacts honestly i'm hoping that a museum or somebody is is watching or um is looking for some cool stuff to add because there are some really good historical items that i've been putting together for a long time so um i gotta go pick up my tags tag this batch and get back at it again tomorrow and we'll carry on see how we can do i'm feeling exhausted off today tell you what i'm back at the shop it's the next morning the morning i'm supposed to take all this stuff into auction and i'm getting everything put in boxes and ready to go finding room for all the stuff like this world war ii canadian helmet complete with the dressings and band-aids uh trade axes from the hudson's bay company hatchets um boy you know just a surprising amount of stuff and this big boy has to go too now i've had this for well i bought it early last year right before we had to shut down for covid and i've had it sitting on display at the shop this was built in the 30s by a gentleman who started a hardware store chain here in alberta they used to display it at tractor shows and yes it would run and you could actually get the steam going through it and operate it um it has a little bit of damage somebody who knows how to repair copper fittings like a plumber or pipefitter somebody can fix that up really really big piece too it's pretty well i think you can almost ride this thing if you stood on the back here it'd be really neat to see this going again at farm auction sales these things can be worth a lot of money i have no idea what this is going to bring at auction but it's a fantastically cool piece and it's gonna go to sale i've also decided to gather up a lot of my antique arsenal from this 1800s military rifle to a world war ii japanese officers sword possibly a general sword it's a very fancy one with the folded blade um masonic swords go back to the 1800 civil war era this is a really cool piece right here this is a 70 caliber firing black powder signal can it was owned by a major in the uh rcmp had this as part of his personal collection i've been hanging on to this for a while it's a beautiful little cannon you know sometimes it's hard to see these things go because you love it so much but it's time for it to find a new home as of all these other artifacts here too here's another fun piece i actually had this on display at my house for a while this is what's called a shipbuilder's half haul but they would have this hanging in the shipbuilder's office when they're putting a ship together this was a three masted schooner one two and three um when they were working on it usually it has the the builder the name of the ship so this one says winterman and pool limited 1849. so that's likely the shipbuilder and we take it down and have a look at the back side you can see it's mounted on this massive board and it's definitely got some weathering and aging to it really cool piece if you're into nautical stuff or want to have a nice display in your house people love these half-haul models and this is a big one too it's probably about close to five feet long it is a big sucker but beautiful beautiful centerpiece in a house especially if you love decorating in the aquatic sort of themes this would look fantastic some of you might remember when i picked this guy up this is a ball and chain and it's super heavy um of course because you wouldn't want somebody just picking it up like a basketball and running around with it thankfully they don't use these anymore it's got the lake shackle still on there this came from the old fort saskatchewan prison i'm told the gentleman i bought it from we used it at um as a gag gift at stag parties and stuff but it actually carries a lot of history from it you know it's well over 100 years old and it's a surviving piece of incarceration history i don't know um but if you think it's cool which i did then this will be going up too um this is like a cast like a heavy sort of cement with this big iron leg running all the way through um it's sturdy as all heck but insert joke here it's still a really neat thing neat part of history and there are people who collect handcuffs and things like this so i'm sure it's going to find a home no problem this little item here is a jaguar and it's a mattet it's for um sort of grinding in so corn or or what have you in the top there um it's fairly big it's a nice little piece look great on a shelf um probably should be in a museum again which is where this one came from this was part of the reynolds museum collection of ancient artifacts that he had uh i just love you know the craftsmanship all the little carvings it just it's got a lot of character it's such a neat piece you know uh it's gonna be like i said all this stuff that these are things that i've just loved and kept around the shop and uh it's just time to let them go okay that batch is over at the auction house i'm gonna get back to the shop now and try and find another 100 items or so um i've got some ideas of some stuff to take down then i'll be done and ready for this auction it's you know it's a fair bit of work getting ready for an auction sale um labeling inventory picking i mean geez if i didn't have melissa to help me out with uh the musician's house sales i would never have gotten through all that stuff uh it is a tremendous amount of work but you hope that the payoff will be worth it when uh when the auction day comes and hopefully you get the right people on there who are bidding on your things but right now it's anybody's guess it is one of the largest gambles i'll probably ever make is putting this stuff through the sale um you know we'll we'll see uh it's gonna it's gonna be uh a lot of really beautiful things and i just hope we can reach the right client who's interested in it um but for now i got to focus on uh the big picture here and that's finding more cool stuff here we go back in the shot stop stop stop oh you guys are hamming it up uh hans and zenovia are here quote unquote helping me to uh get my antiques ready for you know what this is though hey huh any guesses um you see little spikes on there uh it kind of looks like a pitchfork for maybe small headbands oh well you don't look like a small hay bale to me that's what zanovi was athlete a second ago no uh zenovia did you read the tag you noticed no i didn't know okay any guesses i don't know but it picks stuff up because because the prongs on it the the little pieces here right so i don't know i'll give you a hint if you were uh tom hanks in castaway and you would have had this you would have been in good luck because this is a uh fishing spear oh that's right so uh it doesn't have the wooden handle anymore but yeah it says right here from blaine lake about 50 miles north of saskatoon that's stan reynolds writing there this was part of the museum collection um same thing with this too these are all pieces that he had you know all these items that's what i've been doing pretty much all day today i've been uh taking stuff down to auction and getting things ready and you guys are in town kind of cool yeah there i don't these are in the style of mine i don't have much paperwork on these so i can't say that they're ancient um so they'll go through and as mayan style only the stuff that i paper work on is going through being authenticated but they're still really cool um you guys are here oh have a lovely day guys as our regular customers come and go um you're in town because you're working on the musician's house yes what are you doing right now anyway what what's the plan uh vinyl flooring yeah we've got pretty much it uh just the upstairs bedroom and some stairs to finish off for vinyl which will have it done today um then we'll have both bathrooms operational so they got both toilets did you do the sub flooring too yes the subfloor is in okay and if people want to see the progress i guess they can go to uh your channel at some point helping hans yeah it will will they will get on there it's just i'm really slow guys i am really slow well when you get a little bit closer too we'll see if the owner of the house will let me come by and do a little update as well to show people what's been going on too but i know you've got all the behind-the-scenes footage of the progress um yeah i've pretty much just been busy working away here oh i had a gentleman come by i went to uh dutch's bake shop this morning and i got myself a little snackaroo which i haven't had yet but uh gentlemen the area used to have any type jag and this was his original license plate frame off it sunnyvale british motors so i got a little license plate for my car today too yeah um it's just been one of those sort of days just cleaning and working uh but yeah feel free to have a browse around while you're here too and i'm gonna keep uh putting stuff away sounds good one more batch to the auction i found a little box i forgot i had all these little stone effigies railway lanterns um old movie graphs binoculars oh this was a really cool piece one of canada's very first flags the dates are around 1870 10 foot by 15 foot off of a military base really great condition came out of the museum i think they're going to hang it up well i'm going to come back uh hopefully maybe on saturday and come and check and see how everything went how the setup looks apparently they're gonna set up showcases here make it look all fantastic okay well that's it for now um this is gonna be definitely one of the bigger options although not quantity wise but quality wise one of the better options that i've done so now we reach out to the press we try and get people interested um i will come back again on saturday and we'll do a little video and show you how to get everything set up there i'm excited to see how they get it all laid out it is gonna be a sale like no other for sure um so stay with us guys we'll watch and see how this sale does um we have another sale ending of course right now too on this weekend uh i don't know when you're watching this video but uh march 27th is the last day of the musician's house auction uh but this is what we do we have a store you buy you sell and you can't get emotionally attached to things but you know what i did i got emotionally attached to all the stuff that i'm putting through the next sale uh the one in april because it's all historically significant and it's not easy to find you know you can't just walk out to somebody's house and find a king george iii sword or you know a brown best musket or ancient masks or or mayan artifact you just don't come across that stuff every day and so um i had to just kind of rip the band-aid off and say you know i'm not running a museum as much as it would be really fun to have a little museum set up at the shop i am in the business of getting rid of the product which i bought and so that's what i got to do so stay tuned guys we'll uh we'll stay on top of the situation i'll let you guys know what's going on but um right now fingers crossed that uh marketing in the next couple weeks goes well and we start to get some interest in the sale um don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already we'll see y'all soon and bye for now you

Channel: Curiosity Incorporated

Views: 64,112

Rating: 4.9707594 out of 5

Keywords: Curiosity inc, Running a store, Antiques, History channel, Tlc, Hgtv, Discovery channel, Collectibles

Id: fdqZn5Ndx3g

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021