AN ESTATE-SALE sign on the door of Shanon Sara's tree-shaded bungalow in North Seattle beckons you inside, where Sara, a 56-year-old University of Washington employee, sits in an old reading chair making sale tags on her laptop.

On the wall nearest her are framed artworks for sale and behind her are vinyl records she hopes to unload as well.

But Sara has made it a point to tape "Not for Sale" signs on several pieces of furniture — including a flat-screen TV — to prevent anyone from making an offer. Her grandfather's old Hobart M. Cable piano, her grandmother's wooden dining table and the chair she's sitting in are off-limits. These things evidently are too important to sell — not necessarily expensive by an appraiser's standards but worthy of keeping nonetheless.

Sara turns around to greet her guest.

"I'm losing my home," she explains in a jarringly chipper tone.

Struggling with debts from a medical scare last year and the death of her husband, Tim Sara, in 2009, Sara says she has decided to downsize, put the house up for sale and move in with her mom, who lives nearby in the Matthews Beach neighborhood.

She's already had time to mourn. On this sunny weekend morning, she's decided to look on the bright side.

"The one nice thing about happiness is it's completely portable," she says. "You can take it with you wherever you go."

But the "Not for Sale" signs hint that something deeper is at play.

Even in a period when many are forced to pare down and sell off their assets because of financial struggle, as has happened with Sara, objects with sentimental value have their place.

In fact, they can take on greater significance, forming a special category of belongings that touch, renew and inspire, even if they're no longer used. Everybody has at least one cherished possession on display in the living room, tucked away in an old trunk or gathering dust in the attic that will never go to Goodwill or show up on Craigslist.

Sara has no choice but to part with the house, itself a cherished possession that's been in the family since her grandparents bought it in 1944. She's lived here since she and her husband purchased it from her mother in the 1980s.

But keeping things like her grandfather's piano offers some consolation. In tribute to him and the memories of listening to him play the piano when she was a child, she plans to learn to play it after moving in with her mom.

Sara's first lesson in reassessing possessions came in 1988, when a fire destroyed 80 percent of the house, including many personal belongings.

"That's when Tim and I realized it's not the things that are important but the people attached to the things," Sara says as she discusses the task of once again detaching emotionally from material possessions. "As I do this, I'm revisiting lessons learned."

Still, she says, "It seems to me that people need reminders of passages in their lives — literally 'souvenirs.' " Many of the things Sara has chosen not to sell are emotional treasures. They furnish the story of her life and tell the world who she's loved, where she's been and what she's been through.

Sara points to the mantel, where an urn filled with Tim's ashes rests with an angel figurine on it. The urn, naturally, goes with her, too. So does a framed memory board by the front door that's covered with pictures of Tim, snapshots of the couple on trips to the San Juan Islands on their sailboat, sea shells and other mementos from their 35-year marriage. Around her neck is a chain with a pendant she made by cutting out the ID picture on one of Tim's old credit cards after he died. The pendant and matching earrings made from two other credit-card pictures of him stay with her, as well.

"The rest of it is just 'stuff,' " Sara says without a hint of sorrow.

"I think it's very natural to invest emotion in a thing," she says. But "it's a very conscious act to just say, 'No, this has got to go.' "

YOU CAN'T take it with you.

This is a wise but simplistic notion.

At the end of the day, people, memories and dreams are more important than things. It's funny, though, how the things we accumulate over a lifetime help keep those connections vivid in our minds.

But another hard truth is that we often apply a sliding scale of affection for some of our possessions: Something worth cherishing can inexplicably become a thing just worth storing before we abandon it or pass it on to someone else.

People who make a hobby or a living out of scavenging other people's castoff belongings know that even a poor person has at least one valuable thing worth salvaging (and reselling).

That's the hope that draws dozens of bidders to Hansen Bros. Moving & Storage in North Seattle for the company's occasional storage-vault auctions.

A small percentage of clients stop paying rent on their vaults, leaving the items inside in a state of darkened neglect. Years' and months' worth of missed payments pass by. Eventually, after repeated attempts to work out a payment plan allowing clients to recover their things, Hansen Bros. may opt to put these big wooden vaults up for sale to the highest bidders.

The only catch is bidders can't pick and choose which items in a vault they want to buy; they must bid on the entire stash, virtually sight unseen.

Not even company employees know what's in the vaults before they are ceremoniously unlocked and opened at bidding time.

Bidders come equipped with flashlights, as well as belt loops full of padlocks to secure the vaults they buy. As each vault door opens, they line up like spectators at a carnival sideshow for their turn to peer in and shine the harsh light of split-second appraisal on the relics of some stranger's life.

Bidders are not allowed to touch objects, remove coverings or open boxes. Still, they can tell certain things from the way items are placed in the vaults. If objects are stacked neatly and carefully wrapped, for example, you can bet the former owner valued them. That could mean the objects have monetary value as well.

The whole scene invokes both tingling anticipation and bafflement over the thought that someone just left their belongings, precious or not, to rot in a warehouse.

Eric Rovner, founder of Benevia, an affiliate of Hansen Bros. that specializes in consulting older adults who are downsizing or moving to senior housing, says one of the reasons his business does so well is that many people have decided to live "more efficiently," meaning with less space and clutter. That can be a good thing, a way of cleansing the spirit as much as a living space.

But there's a different kind of customer for whom "storage is that infamous middle ground" between keeping something and getting rid of it, Rovner says. It can also represent a kind of hope — a hope that one day, when hard times improve, when that extra 20 pounds comes off, when that great business opportunity comes through, the items hastily stashed in that vault will retake their rightful place, back in a happy home.

Sometimes the original vault renters will show up at an auction and try to purchase their belongings at a lower price than the amount they owe the storage company.

At the vault sale, about 40 people gather around auctioneer Alan Holm, who stands on a step ladder in front of a row of containers outside the company's warehouse.

"I have no idea what's in any of these," he tells the crowd. "I'll be as surprised as you."

By the opening of the seventh vault, the process starts to run swiftly. "Paper — and teddy bears," a bidder says after inspecting the vault.

"It's like Christmas," says Natasha James, who has driven down from Mount Vernon with her three kids in hopes of purchasing a vault with enough good items to sell online.

After all of the vaults are sold, the new owners get to rummage through them to see exactly what they've purchased. The majority of the vaults contain more trash than treasure from a monetary standpoint — old but not antique chairs, a slept-on mattress, lamps, gardening tools, a dusty vacuum cleaner, potted fake plants, a cat bed, Halloween decorations — signs of life in sudden transition, on hold or terminated.

Company officials have spotted photo albums, vintage pinball machines, musical instruments, safes, swords and even loved ones' ashes.

"There's a million stories," Rovner says. "If you look at something and don't know the story behind it, you just have to wonder."

AT PACIFIC Galleries, the antique mall and auction house south of downtown Seattle, Rovner's idea has its fullest expression, with row upon row of what were once, presumably, cherished objects on display for connoisseurs as well as casual window-shoppers.

One metal stand holds French children's hats from 1910. There's an elegant vintage bathing suit mounted on a frame, perhaps a reminder of a honeymoon cruise. There are road maps from trips taken or wished for. There are old piggy banks. There are scores of tables, chairs and mirrors that have no doubt witnessed their share of feasts, catnaps and stolen kisses.

Each piece has a story locked inside, which makes it valuable beyond dollars and cents. One day, someone else will buy these things and imbue them with a whole new set of memories and emotions, starting the life cycle of worth all over again.

"Why is it that we hold onto things?" Seattle artist and collector Mark O'Connell muses aloud one night at his sumptuously decorated condo on Capitol Hill.

It's a rhetorical question, of course.

Objects of art and curiosity fill the living room, bedroom and hallway in a space O'Connell shares with his partner, Michael Hytinen, who works in the contemporary art business. A visitor might have a hard time picking the one or even six things in the condo that are priceless to him.

But O'Connell homes in on a small ceramic statue in a corner of the room. It's of a little boy standing on his head in a moment of childish glee, or perhaps nose-thumbing rebellion. Either way, O'Connell finds the piece, by Japanese artist Kensuke Yamada, inspiring.

"It makes me laugh, and I need to surround myself with more things like that," O'Connell says of the piece, one of the first major artworks he's purchased. "It reminds me that even at 45, I have to act like a child sometimes."

As a portrait artist, O'Connell is a skilled observer of other people's personalities, but the boy statue is a reflection of his own temperament, or the way he'd prefer to think of himself, in any case.

O'Connell recently held a sale of his work, and at the last minute of the event, someone offered to buy a painting called "Blindman" from him. The moody acrylic painting depicts a young blind man dressed in a period hat and coat and sporting a handlebar mustache, much like the one O'Connell himself wears. The man's pupil-less eyes force the viewer to confront ideas about beauty and the marginalization of people who are different.

O'Connell loves it so much that he's hung it in his condo until the sale goes through.

He says "Blindman" isn't a self-portrait, but as he discusses the painting's significance, it becomes clear that at least two objects in the home are close to his heart. One will stay, and the other, a work of art made to be sold, after all, will go to someone else.

"Even though I could reproduce that painting, there was a feeling and energy the day I painted it — everything was going really well for me, and that was infused into the piece," O'Connell says of "Blindman."

On second thought, he says, "Maybe I would never be able to paint it exactly the same way."

Ten years ago, he says, maybe he wouldn't have been as attached to the little boy sculpture or to the portrait as he is today.

"Aging really starts to make you more sentimental," he explains.

As you grow older and your values change, he says, the value you place on things changes, too.

JAMIE EDWARDS is what athletic-shoe fans call a "sneakerhead," the kind of person you might find at Capitol Hill sneaker havens like 35th North, Rock Paper Scissors and Goods. He loves kicks, especially limited-edition designs from the Nike Air Jordan and Nike SB collection aimed at the skateboarding community.

His interest goes back to high school.

Back then, owning great sneakers was just cool.

"As I've gotten older, I still have that fondness, and it kind of takes me back," Edwards says.

Now 30, the West Seattle resident thinks of shoes the way other people appreciate fine art. He buys many of his special sneakers at 35th North, calling ahead to make sure he knows the date of special releases. Today, it's about quality, not quantity.

He heads downstairs to the ground floor of his home, where a built-in closet houses about four dozen shoe boxes set two deep on the shelves.

He pulls out box after box of Nikes to reveal some of the most spectacular color combinations imaginable. Many pairs were specially designed for Nike enthusiasts.

The "Pee-wee Herman" high-top is light gray with red accents, like the former TV-show character's famous ill-fitting suit.

Edwards has sold parts of his collection, including when he was preparing to serve in the Peace Corps in his 20s and more recently when he sold three pairs to raise money to buy a dog for his girlfriend. But he's not inclined to ever part with his most exclusive Nikes.

"You've got some guys who will just leave them in the box" and never wear them, he says.

Edwards isn't that far gone, though he avoids wearing certain sneakers to clubs or other places where spills are a risk. He keeps a shoe-cleaning station in his basement well-stocked with supplies to spruce up dirty sneaks. "I just take a lot of pride in my shoes — I know it sounds crazy," he says. Collecting sneakers, he says, "defines who I am."

Sometimes he'll pour a glass of wine, sit back and just admire his collection.

Other times, "I look at my collection and I think, 'Man, what am I doing?' "

The short answer applies to Edwards and anyone who has pondered the reasons some belongings matter so much: The things we discard may say something about our lives at any given moment, but we are what we keep.

Tyrone Beason is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Ken Lambert is a Seattle Times staff photographer.