\u00ab\u00a0We never use it, it is stored in the attic.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0It was a wedding present; in forty years, we have never used it once.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0It belonged to my mother-in-law, but she herself had never used it either.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0I was given this goblet for my first communion, and I have no idea what to do with it.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n
From our hands-on experience at Gold & Silver Company, this is how silverware arrives at the agency, week after week, almost always with the same words. No heartbreak, no farewells: a large, imposing set that has occupied a sideboard or an attic for decades, and that its owners simply want to get rid of. The word is an honest one, and it shocks no one here. What comes as a surprise is rather how the story ends: some clients have walked out with several thousand euros for a set that nobody, in forty years, had ever taken out of its case.<\/p>\n
Our page on silver and silverware<\/a> explains what gives a set its value: the hallmarks, the fineness, what gets weighed and what does not. This article is for the person who keeps the object without giving it a thought. It comes down to three pieces of news, all of them good: that value can be measured in under thirty minutes, it is paid immediately, and once sold, the metal will finally know the use it was never given.<\/p>\n Silverware may be the only precious object one owns without ever using it. Given as a gift meant to last, reserved for grand occasions that never came, it has crossed the decades in its original case, sometimes still wrapped in tissue paper. It is heavy, it takes up room, it would demand polishing. Many sets arrive at the agency in mint condition: forty years old, not a single meal served.<\/p>\n There is no ingratitude in any of this. It is the ordinary fate of these gifts from another era, designed for an art of the table that is no longer ours. But the conclusion that matters must be drawn: selling silverware that has never been used is not losing a memory, it is setting a metal free. Silver does not die: it can be remelted indefinitely, without losing any of its properties. The cutlery contains exactly the same silver as on the day it was struck. And while that metal sleeps in the attic, its market price does not.<\/p>\n Here, concretely, is what awaits you if you walk through the door of the agency in Dottignies (Mouscron). No appointment needed. The set arrives as it is: original case, cardboard box, shoebox; no one will ask you to have polished it or counted the forks.<\/p>\n The expert reads the hallmarks, tests the metal in front of you, sets aside what cannot be weighed, weighs the rest to the nearest gram on a certified scale turned towards you, and announces a figure calculated on the day’s price. Less than thirty minutes later, for a standard complete set, you know exactly what the object sleeping in your home is worth. The offer commits you to nothing: if it suits you, payment is immediate; if it does not, you leave with your set, at no cost. The detail of the calculation, from weighable weight to metal value, is explained on the silver and silverware<\/a> page, with the day’s price to back it up.<\/p>\n Thirty minutes of appraisal against decades in an attic: this is probably the best hourly rate that object will ever offer you.<\/p>\n An appraisal is only as good as the person making it. Ours are carried out on the premises by precious metal experts who see thousands of kilos of silver pass through their hands every week: complete cutlery sets, serving dishes, goblets, mismatched pieces from entire estates. At that volume, the eye no longer makes mistakes. Solid silver is told apart from plated ware in a few movements, 800 from 925 fineness without hesitation, the weighable portion separated from the rest with a sure hand. They know what they are weighing, and they know what they are assessing.<\/p>\n There is a second reason to trust the figure: the house buys in order to transform, not to resell the lot to a third party. What the expert weighs, the workshop will melt. The figure therefore rests on the material itself, measured, never on the bet of a resale. A broker sells a price; a refinery masters the material.<\/p>\n That is the other singularity of the house: the refinery sits behind the agency, under the same roof. Melters, refiners, assayers. In the classic buy-back circuit, silverware leaves in a sealed bag to a wholesaler, who resells it to a refiner, often beyond our borders; each link in the chain weighs, transports, insures, and lives off a margin that the original seller finances without seeing it. Here, the journey spans a few metres, and the offer is made net, with no chain of intermediaries to finance.<\/p>\n In the workshop, sorting comes first: steel blades removed, weighted handles set aside, everything that is not silver leaves the lot. Then the crucible: pure silver melts at 961.8 degrees, the cutlery collapses, the metal takes on its liquid-mirror surface, and the pour freezes in the ingot mould what once was a cutlery set. At the moment of casting, an assay sample goes to the laboratory: the exact fineness of the lot, to the thousandth, measured on the molten material rather than estimated on the object. The hallmark announced; the assay proves. It is the same assayer’s craft that certifies our gold bars<\/a>.<\/p>\n Refining does the rest: through electrolysis, the silver redeposits crystal by crystal, purer than 999 thousandths, ready to set off again. As granules for the workshops of jewellers and silversmiths; as investment bars, at the counter of bars and coins<\/a>, alongside gold; and finally into industry, for silver is the best electrical conductor there is, and solar panels and electronics absorb most of it. This refiner’s patience, as old as Babylonian cupellation, is told in our history of precious metal refining<\/a>. And the loop is local: the metal bought at the agency is the house’s raw material, recycled European silver that comes from the region’s sideboards.<\/p>\n What remains is the essential, and it concerns you: getting rid of it becomes a clean gesture. A single trip, an appraisal of under thirty minutes, a payment to your bank account, and a cumbersome set that leaves the house for good, without classified ads, without car boot sales, without the boxes of the next inheritance. As for pieces worth more than their weight, great silversmith signatures, antique pieces, collectibles, the examination spots them and the house tells you so: the crucible is never a reflex.<\/p>\n The metal that spent forty years doing nothing in an attic becomes one of the most actively useful materials of our time. The communion goblet that stayed in its tissue paper may end up in a solar roof; it had to be sold to finally be of use. There was nothing to regret: nothing had happened yet.<\/p>\n This is the most common case at the agency: a set received as a wedding gift or inherited, never used, cumbersome, that nobody in the family wishes to take over. The simplest answer is to have it appraised: without an appointment, at the Dottignies agency, hallmarks read and tests carried out in front of you, an offer calculated to the gram on the weighable portion alone. The appraisal takes less than thirty minutes for a standard set, and the offer commits you to nothing: if it suits you, payment is immediate; if not, you leave with your set, at no cost whatsoever. You are also free to think it over and come back another day: nothing is ever signed on the spot.<\/p>\n Less than thirty minutes for a standard set, stopwatch in hand. The sequence is always the same: reading the hallmarks, authenticity tests performed in front of you, separation between what is weighable and what is not, weighing to the nearest gram, then a priced offer based on the day’s rate. If it suits you, the sum is transferred to your bank account; if not, you leave with your set, free of charge and without any commitment. There is no need to sort, polish or count anything before coming: bring the set exactly as it is, in its case or loose. The whole point of the appraisal is to do that work for you, quickly and transparently.<\/p>\n The appraisal is carried out on the premises by precious metal experts who see thousands of kilos of silver pass through their hands every week: cutlery sets, dishes, goblets, pieces from entire estates. At that volume, the eye no longer makes mistakes: solid or plated, 800 or 925 thousandths, weighable portion and portion to set aside. Above all, the house buys in order to transform: what the expert weighs, the workshop melts. The figure rests on measured material, never on the bet of a resale. A broker sells a price; a refinery masters the material, and that is precisely what keeps the offer grounded in fact.<\/p>\n Neither. The Dottignies agency receives visitors without an appointment, and the set may arrive exactly as it is: in its original case, in a cardboard box, in a shoebox. There is no need to polish, sort or count the pieces; that is precisely the work of the appraisal, and it is done in front of you. Simply bring a form of identification, which is required for any purchase of precious metals. And if the set feels heavy to carry, that is rather a good sign: weight is the first component of the value of solid silverware, and the heavier the lot, the more worthwhile the trip tends to be.<\/p>\n No, not by reflex, and that is a point the house cares about. The examination at the agency identifies the pieces worth more than their weight: great silversmith signatures, antique pieces, collectibles. When that is the case, the house tells the client and the offer takes it into account, on a case-by-case basis. The crucible is reserved for ordinary metal, the kind whose value is the silver itself: mismatched cutlery sets, pieces never taken out of their case, unsigned dishes. Exceptional silversmith heritage deserves a fate other than melting, and it is the appraisal that draws that line, never habit or convenience. You will always be told before anything irreversible is decided. *Updated on 4 September 2026.*<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" That silverware you never use may be worth thousands of euros. Free appraisal, no appointment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":501,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-actualite"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldandsilvercompany.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldandsilvercompany.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldandsilvercompany.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldandsilvercompany.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldandsilvercompany.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/goldandsilvercompany.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldandsilvercompany.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/goldandsilvercompany.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldandsilvercompany.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/goldandsilvercompany.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The attic paradox<\/h2>\n
Thirty minutes, stopwatch in hand<\/h2>\n
Experts who weigh thousands of kilos a week<\/h2>\n
A few metres away, the crucible<\/h2>\n
The sideboard breathes again<\/h2>\n
Frequently asked questions about selling silverware<\/h2>\n
I never use my silverware: what can I do with it?<\/h3>\n
How long does a silverware appraisal take?<\/h3>\n
Who appraises my silverware, and how can I be sure of the figure?<\/h3>\n
Do I need to make an appointment or prepare anything?<\/h3>\n
Does a signed or antique piece also go to the crucible?<\/h3>\n