SWNSYou may want to check your old second-hand furniture – a couple who bought an antique chair for £5 recently discovered diamonds worth £5,000 hidden inside it.
Angela Milner-Brown, 50, and husband Angus, 47, from Biggar, South Lanarkshire picked up an old chair at an auction for £5, 10 years ago, the Telegraph reports – and it turns out it’s worth a whole lot more than that.
When the couple first bought the chair, it needed to be reupholstered. Because they couldn’t afford it at the time, they stuck it in the attic for six years, and recently, Angus decided to fix it up.
This is what he found:
GettyAngela said:
We couldn’t afford to have it reupholstered at the time so my husband put it in the attic and it ended up staying in there for around six years.
Eventually we were able to get the chair reupholstered and it looked really nice, I never expected anything else to come out of it.
But a few years back my husband surprised me with a diamond ring for our wedding anniversary. He’d found it hidden down inside the chair.
The following Valentine’s Day, he gave me a pair of diamond earrings and then a diamond broach at Easter.
They must have been hidden inside the chair by previous owners. We just couldn’t believe it.
Turns out, Angus had discovered a £5,000 stash of diamonds hidden inside the cushioning material of the chair. Instead of telling his wife, he decided to keep the diamonds a secret so he could surprise her in the name of romance.
SWNSLast Thursday, The BBC’s Antiques Roadshow visited New Lanark and the couple took the chair and jewellery to have them valued.
Angela added:
We thought it would be a good idea to take it along to the roadshow and the experts were just as astonished as we were.
They told us that the diamond jewellery and the chair were worth around £5,000 together.
It was an amazing, wonderful discovery for us. You just never know what you’ll find in an old piece of furniture, I suppose.
Talk about literally sitting on a fortune!
