Dear Lee,

Clutter is out of control in the house. I am going through papers, cabinets full of dishes, and closets full of dresses. I follow dozens of auctions and sales to learn trends and prices and I have learned you must be careful what you throw away.

A recent auction of Tiffany lamps sold parts of lamps, bases, shade holders, shade rings, heat caps, and a kerosene font. Prices ranged from $200 to $1,500. And there was a collection of over 50 glass lampshades that brought from $88 to $6,500. In our saved parts drawer we have lily-shaped shades we bought at a garage sale hoping to find a lamp to go with them, and the pull chains with acorn tips to a Handel lamp we fixed—all worth money today because they are hard to find. Toy prices prove having the toy’s original box can add hundreds of dollars to the price. Of course, I shouldn’t have discarded the baseball card collection or the campaign buttons collected free and new in the 1960s that later became old and pricey at antiques shows. The unidentified vase with chipped hydrangea blossoms was almost discarded, but its twin was in a museum show of early rare Cincinnati art pottery this month. Now I can try to learn who made it.

Don’t throw out most things over 75 years old including gardening tools and cookbooks, class pictures, diaries and family letters that describe events and activities, maps, or work related ephemera like cab driver hats. And save every bit of your children’s school art project. Who knows? They might turn out to be famous and the pictures, like those by the young Roy Lichtenstein, can sell for over $50,000 each.