It's a dream we all have: find something that looks really old and hope that it's worth enough money to give us peace of mind for the next few years.

Unfortunately, most of us will have to dream on.

One man's forgotten family blanket, which was tucked away in his closet for many years, made his dreams come true.

Loren Krytzer was broke and unemployed, renting out a $700 shack on the edge of California's Liona Valley. He had been surviving on $900 disability checks per month, after he lost a leg in a car accident, leaving him only $200 each month to spend.

"It was rough," he told CNBC Make It. "I mean, we would literally go to Costco ... and get a Costco hot dog and a Coke cause they were $1.50." He added that some nights he would drink vodka to ease the phantom pains in his leg.

But how did he discover the worth of a blanket he deemed to be worthless?

In 2011, Krytzer saw an episode of Antiques Roadshow that displayed a Navajo blanket said to be worth around $500,000.

"I paused it and I went and got the blanket and I'm sitting there holding it. ... I'm lining up the lines on the TV with the blanket, seeing if they match," Krytzer said.

However, the first few antique dealers he went to turned him away, and others dismissed the worth of the blanket.

Krytzer saw a glimmer of hope when he dug a little further online.  

"I looked them up online and they had an ad for bringing in items, like an open [appraisal] day," he recalled.

He took the blanket to Jeff Moran from John Moran Auctioneers, who inspected the blanket and deemed it to be one of the rarest Navajo chief's blankets in the world.

The blanket from the 1800s was estimated to sell at $200,000, but Krytzer wanted to see if he could sell it for more money.

And he did. The auction lasted just over a minute and the Navajo blanket sold for $1.5 million.

"They had to bring over water and stuff to me and wipe sweat off my head," Krytzer recalled. "I started hyperventilating because I couldn't believe it. ... Everything just went limp and I couldn't catch my breath."

"It was just hard to grasp," he added. "I mean, I worked hard my whole life. I was in construction, I never bought anything, I never saved, I always rented. I bought used cars cause that's all I could afford. I lived paycheck to paycheck my whole life."

What would you buy if you sold something you deemed to be worthless for more than a million dollars?

[Source: CNBC]