Following is my list of ten objects my clients thought of as junk until I saw them. In all the cases below, the client called me to a home to appraise something entirely different. But I keep my eyes peeled!
A newspaper clipping of a Charlie Brown comic strip from the 1980-90s signed by Charles Schulz.
Outcome: I found the “right” auction house for signed ephemera: R&R Auctions sold it for five-figures.- A ten inch tall cylinder-form woven basket used for twenty years as an office wastebasket.
Outcome: Called to appraise the roll top desk (worth $300), saw the 1920s Nootka Makah (Native American) Northwest Coast basket on the floor underneath. My client, a retired school administrator, took the trip of a lifetime to the Makah Reservation in Neah Bay, Washington (Northwestern Vancouver Island) to give it back to the People. - A small, three-by-four-by-two-and-half-inch, oval silver bowl on a pedestal, with a blue glass liner, used for paper clips sat on the roll top desk.
Outcome: I discovered this is a 1770 ‘open salt cellar’ made by one of England’s earliest female silversmiths. Hester Bateman (1708-94), a notable 18th century entrepreneur who founded a major workshop she passed to her son, daughter-in-law, grandson, and great-grandson. By the way, an open salt cellar is a little dish or bowl used at a formal table to hold salt, a commodity in the 18th century—before the salt shaker. We sold this salt cellar at Christies for $800. 
I found a strange turquoise vase in a matte glaze featuring a nude female draped around the bulbous form stored in a potting shed in Montecito.
Outcome: Considered hideous by the client, it turned out to be an art pottery work of art by husband-and-wife Artus and Anne Van Briggle. They founded Van Briggle Pottery, the oldest continuously operating art pottery studio in the Nation, in 1901 in Colorado Springs. They named the vase the ‘Lorelei’ vase, crafted in a distinctly American Art Nouveau style. We sold it to Just Art Pottery for $750.- In a garage I noticed something in a box for Goodwill. My client thought the strange glazed stoneware charger with an image of a stylized animal a child’s 4th grade kiln class pottery dish.
Outcome: We sent a photo to the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts in Upper Ojai. They confirmed it as a 1960s work by the Dadaist artist Beatrice Wood (1893-1998), a famed studio potter in the collection of many museums—notably the Smithsonian. My client donated it to the Beatrice Wood Center, and I wrote him a Federal Income Tax deduction appraisal for $1,800. A telling marking: Wood’s pottery is signed “Beato.” 
I discovered a homely table lamp featuring a cast metal figure of a Grecian style phoenix bird, forty-two-inches-tall, in the crate going to Destined for Grace Thrift in Goleta.
Outcome: Turned out to be a 1950s creation of a favorite of the mid-century design world, William (Billy) Haines, the number-one Hollywood box office star of 1930 who became Hollywood’s premier interior decorator. We sold it at one of the Nation’s premier auction houses for Modernist decorative art, furniture, and fine art, Wright, in Chicago, for $5,400.- My client thought her late great-aunt, an amateur needlewoman, created a loudly colored late 1970s large floral needlepoint wall-hanging, signed illegibly, titled “Playful Leaves.” My client hated it and begged her son to take it.
Outcome: My client’s son discovered it was Latin American textile art, a hot property today, by an important 1970-80s contemporary artist-designer Jorge Cravo. We sold it at Los Angeles Modern Auctions for $3,000-5,000. 
If you have kids you probably have a costume basket. My client’s contained a tri-corner hat in black felt with a rosette cockade and a silver wheel-shaped button. Her youngest wore it as the topper for his Napoleon costume.
Outcome: a “Chapeau de Bras” from the Mexican War era (1840-49) sold at Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati for $920.- My client’s grandfather passed down a pheasant taxidermy mount, two-birds on a log, twenty-one by thirty-eight-inches. He thought it an invaluable, yet moth-eaten, antique.
Outcome: No one will buy taxidermy today. The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History reluctantly accepted as a donation.. - A Father Christmas vintage wind-up doll, twenty-nine-inches, whose head nodded up and down, thanks to interior mechanical workings, holds gifts and a scraggly tree. Inherited from German relatives in the 1960s.
Outcome: The German clockwork “Noddy” with a composition (plastic) face and open/shut eyes sold for over $2,500 at Pook & Pook’s Toy Auction in Pennsylvania.