It may not be worth as much nowadays but antique furniture sure looks nicer than plastic furniture and bar stools if you have the right type of home for it.
You are spot on. We bought a large pre-foreclosure house in Florida that was once owned by a pretty famous old-Hollywood celebrity. When we bought it, it was utterly dilapidated. Over the years we have slowly fixed and polished everything and furnished it with extremely cheap but sturdy wooden antiques. Instead of modern/Ikea bookcases, we bought antique chests and cabinets for third of the price. Honestly most of the pieces cost more in moving/shipping than material.
For a solid year my wife and I went to estate sales or pre-retirement-home-move garage sales every weekend and bought 20+ paintings depicting local Florida nature to line up our hallways. We barely spent $2000 on paintings and furniture combined to furnish living room, family room, dining room, hallways, bathrooms, and 5 bedrooms (ignoring beds). Our guests often remark how gorgeous our house looks because of the antiques.
We got lucky that the house we bought goes well with antiques. Otherwise we would have easily spent $10k+ on comparable furnishing.
