As we will see below, homes are full of treasures that their owners are often unaware of. Sometimes, they are relics that can literally change your life. One of these fascinating stories tells of an old Romanian woman. For decades, she had been using a strange button on her door that made it easier for her to enter and exit a room. Of course, the button was not normal.

The old woman and the doorknob. The story takes us back to 1991, when an elderly woman died in the village of Colti in southeastern Romania. Decades earlier, she had found a 3.5-pound rock in a stream bed, which she had used as a doorstop ever since, without knowing anything about its origins.

After his death, the house was inherited by a relative who noticed the strange rock that served as a doorknob. It turned out to be a giant nugget of black amber, also known as Romanian amber. And it wasn’t anything ordinary, it was the largest in the world, dating back 40 to 70 million years and worth more than a million euros.

The “top” was sold to the Romanian State and is today classified as a national treasure. A fascinating story, but as we said at the beginning, it is not unique.

My button is a meteorite. Ten years before the elderly woman’s death, a neighbor from Michigan, USA, bought a farm. Among the household items was a metallic-looking stone weighing about 10 kilos. For decades, the family used the stone for the same purpose as the previous owner: to prevent the door from closing.

What they didn’t know was that the doorstops were worth a great deal. That’s when they decided to take the odd piece for analysis. It was a meteorite, and not just any piece. It was a particularly rare metallic meteorite weighing around 25 pounds (10.2 kilograms) and composed of nickel and iron. In fact, the Smithsonian Museum confirmed the find, valuing the piece at around $100,000.

A fortunate reform. Renovating your home can be one of the worst experiences for a homeowner. There are exceptions, like the couple from Yorkshire, England, who were lucky enough to stumble upon a hoard of 18th-century gold coins, estimated to be worth up to £250,000, under the floorboards of their home two years ago.

My kitchen painting is a masterpiece. We moved to Compiegne, France. A woman is about to sell her house but decides to take her belongings to an auctioneer to prove their value. The man is shocked when he sees a painting hanging above the kitchen stove. The woman was living with a lost 13th century work by Florentine artist Cimabue. A masterpiece that sold at auction for $26.8 million.

Millionaire chess piece. Apparently, a medieval chessboard containing pieces made of walrus ivory was found on the Isle of Lewis in 1831. But five of the game pieces were missing. Two centuries later, one of the pieces was added: An Edinburgh family learned that one of the chess pieces, which had been in their home for years, was actually worth $1.2 million.

Attic with a surprise. Attics can be spaces that are not lived in for long periods of time, depending on the home. An attic in Toulouse, France, was filled with toys, clocks and clothes that had been gathering dust for years. In 2014, the owners found something in the trash they were going to throw out: an original painting by Renaissance artist Caravaggio. Appraised: $114 million to $171 million.

My ring was not a trinket. 1980s. A woman buys a ring she thinks is a fake from West Middlesex Hospital in London. You pay just $13 and wear it almost every day for 30 years. The woman, who always asked to remain anonymous, nearly fell to the ground in fear in 2017. The ring was actually a 26-carat diamond. She sold it for $800,000.

This is not a plate, it is a Picasso. A Rhode Island woman bought a ceramic plate in 1970, paying less than $100 for the dinnerware. What did she do? She hung it on the wall above her kitchen stove, where it had accumulated a good layer of grease and dust over the years.

In 2014, the woman’s light bulb went off and she decided to evaluate this strange dish on the legendary program “Antiques Roadshow.” Yes, I didn’t know it until then, but she was the owner of the 1955 Madoura plate designed by Picasso.

It costs a fortune to plug a hole. The latest of the cases that urgently require a thorough search of every corner of our home takes us to the United States, where a man buys a painting and some second-hand furniture for very little money.

The painting was hung on the wall to cover a hole. Ten years later, while playing the board game Masterpiece, he discovered that what he saw before his eyes was a work by 19th-century American painter Martin Johnson Head. In 1999, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts paid him $1.25 million for it.

Image | BUZAU MUSEUM, Cheryl Colan

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