The future will allow us to live in the past…
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Right there with you. My new dreamy little dream is a houseboat in the Keys.
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Yeah, that music professor definitely had a point. And that’s with a relatively “simple” object like sheet music. I’d imagine buildings are more like canvasses, in that they might have layer upon layer of “new building” added to them as they are used, just as painters both previously and now paint over canvasses for various reasons - which means that “excavating” them can teach us a lot, but is also sadly often a destructive process. The way I see it, in-use preservation has the value of not letting things disappear or get entirely broken, but at the cost of potential damage and loss of historically relevant stuff by either being damaged by remodeling/new additions or simply by wear and tear. It is still a great way of preserving things, as it must surely be better to do a historical/archeological study of a 500-year-old building that’s still in use than one that’s no longer standing, potentially with parts removed over the years etc. But then again, as long as it’s in use there are strict limits to just how much we can learn from it - I don’t think most people would appreciate a team of archeologists coming and demolishing their house. There are pros and cons to pretty much everything 
And I entirely agree about relatable everyday objects often being the most interesting - fancy ceremonial pieces can be very impressive, but the wow-effect of exquisite craftsmanship, precious metals, jewels and other fancy stuff is mostly a one time thing, and beyond that its value is likely ceremonial, making it quite abstract and requiring a lot of knowledge to contextualize and hard to relate to. Once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it, more or less, and going beyond that might require significant effort. On the other hand the appreciation of everyday objects can be a lot easier - everything from appreciating the craftsmanship to the in-use value of the object to how it resembles contemporary “relatives” to signs of use/repair to the much easier job of imagining it in a setting, being used by people. I think that’s the thing that attracts people to antiques too - the multilayered appreciation of an object that is both old enough to have a history, was probably made quite well (seeing how it has survived), and can still be put to use.
The museum I mentioned is Sverresborg Trøndelag Folk Museum, located barely outside the city centre of Trondheim (literally a 15-minute bus ride from the town square). It’s located around the site of a 12th-century castle (not much left, sadly). Trondheim (and the surrounding region) is generally a good place to visit if you’re interested in history - though a middling sized town (around 200 000 people, still the 3rd largest in the country) the city centre is tiny, confined to a peninsula of sorts between a river and a fjord, meaning you can walk across it in any direction in about half an hour. The town is a bit more than a thousand years old, and though there obviously isn’t anything left that old we do have some nice ruins, a cathedral that I guess technically is really old (though its current design is about a century old and was actually finished about 20 years ago, construction of the first cathedral on the site started in 1070), and we also have some fantastically preserved (in use, though with strict restrictions on any changes made to the buildings) 18th- and 19th-century working-class neighbourhoods bordering the city centre on two sides (Bakklandet and Ilsvikøra). A decent selection of other museums too. Though, being Norway, beware that visiting is definitely not cheap.
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