I recently gave four broken antique chairs to a tech ed teacher—that’s shop for you other old people. They ranged in age from 1840-ish to 1890-ish and I had been letting them sit in my basement for too long.

One of them I had had, intending to repair, for almost 20 years. I bought it for $20 at an estate sale in Georgetown in 2003 and moved it from Virginia to California and back to Virginia, between six houses, while I intended to learn how to replace its ancient rush seat. That’s not a bargain. Two of them were antique cane-seat children’s chairs that my then-two-year-old found deeply engrossing to pick apart, and then movers broke one of their legs.

When I went to the big antique market in Brimfield, Massachusetts, this past summer, I had to fight against the urge to buy all kinds of old stuff that needed fixing (like I had done the previous summer). My travel companion, who is also an interior designer, and I made a pact that we wouldn’t. We are old hands at seeing potential in a mess; it’s a big part of the job! The dusty piles of things we have loaded into each other’s cars is truly mind-boggling.

I did buy a painting and a print that needed framing at Brimfield, but I still kind of wish I hadn’t. I just recently got some antique prints framed that I bought in 2009, and they are still wrapped in the brown paper four months later. And, conversely, I have to stop myself from buying good empty antique frames.

Lamps for rewiring and furniture for reupholstering are also off the table for the time being. I have a storage unit filled with pieces of furniture I bought just because they were a good deal. I have lots of lamps and pillow inserts and a few paintings in there too.

The truth is, buying things for some day, for some client, for some house, has become less of a bargain than an expense. My storage unit isn’t free. Framing and reupholstery are expensive to be doing it just to save something. I still don’t know how to re-cane or re-rush seats.

I know I just recently wrote a blog post about the virtues of old furniture and reupholstery, and I still believe it, I’m just saying I am coming late to the belief that I need to have a reason for buying something, and not just because of its potential.

It’s funny, because I love purging stuff and sending stuff off to the Red Cross or Purple Hearts. I’m generally a light packer. I love having a tiny bag on the airplane while other people are struggling and smushing. I have always liked sticking a credit card in my back pocket and seeing where the wind takes me that day or night. But I can’t resist a bargain on a bolt of high-end fabric, and I’m never going to donate a 19^th-century lithograph to Goodwill, so I’m stuck with being their caretaker, sometimes for years.

And what do you buy just because it’s funny? I love my yellow and wicker rotary phone, but it doesn’t really work anymore. Where, in fact, would I plug it in?

I don’t know where I’m going with this, but maybe it’s to say, look out for me opening a page on Chairish.com, where I will sell some of these things that have been burning a hole in my pocket.

Call it a New Year’s resolution that has been slowly coming. The wave of the future for Sallie Hess Interiors is “light and fast”…until we go to Round Top in the spring.