Back at my parents house, the oldest thing I own are a pair of twin beds and a matching dresser from the mid 1940s. The set was my mom’s while she was growing up, then they were mine. Whenever I have kids, they will go to my daughter.

In the apartment where I am now, the oldest thing I use on a daily basis would be a set of bookshelves that I bought with my mom at Target in the mid 1990s. Everything else is pretty much new and from Ikea.

At my parents house, we have a couch, two chairs, and a rocking chair that belonged to my great-grandmother and are from the late 1930s. We refinished them and use them often. The only problem is the couch and the two chairs are really uncomfortable, but we are not allowed to get rid of them because they hold too much sentimental value to my dad. When we watch tv, I sit on the floor because it is more comfortable.

If you count the oldest non-man made thing i own, then it’d be a piece of amber that my late uncle gave me. He dug it up in Africa when he was a kid, thats at least 30 million years old.

I have a rare (rare enough enough that there’s no record of it in Gruhn’s Guide) Kay flat top from the 1950s.

And I have three Stella’s from either the late 50’s or early 60’s.

Only one of the Stellas is somewhat playable because the Alberta climate eats old guitars. The Kay, which was my main guitar for many years, has also suffered quite a bit. I’m hoping to restore it soon.

The piano is 106 years old this year, was originally purchased by Mom’s grandparents and spent it’s first 70 years in the parlor on the farm before we got it. Three moves and three decades later it’s badly in need of refinishing (it might have been black once but now it’s dingy brown), horribly out of tune, and eating up about 1/4 of my living room.

Here’s the weird, small-world-isn’t-it-insert-Twilight-
Zone-music-here part. My mom is from farm country south of Sioux Falls, SD. The piano was made in my dad’s hometown in Illinois farm country south of Rockford. The piano factory closed eons ago and was turned into one of those quaint, small town micro-malls with all sorts of mom-and-pop shops and a cafe where Granddad and his cronies used to have breakfast every week. I got to go with him once. Looooong ago.

It comes complete with sand…

Also have about 50 old cameras, dating from 1910’s – 1970’s, a collection of demitasse tea cups and saucers from Occupied Japan (1945-1952), a first edition of “South Pacific” (1947), and an old school Nintendo (circa 1987).

If you’re accepting natural objects, we’ve got some miscellaneous fossils (trilobites, fish, dinosaurs), so hundreds of millions of years old, but my husband the paleontology buff would have to give you more precise dates