I keep a box of paper too damaged to use and I can't throw it out
At the studio today I spent twenty minutes sorting a box of paper that is, objectively, garbage. Foxed, water-stained, torn along a fold that won't sit flat. Some of it is from a 1930s Swedish encyclopedia that came in for repair and could not be saved. My colleague put it in the recycling and I took it out again.
I know exactly what it is. It's the fear of the day I need that particular brown. The stain on this one is a colour I could not mix. So the box grows and I use maybe two pieces a year.
Half of conservation is deciding what is not worth keeping. I am good at that at work. At home in my own practice I am sentimental about paper and nothing else.
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That brown you can't mix is the whole problem, isn't it. Stains and foxing make colours nobody can reproduce because they weren't chosen, they just happened. I have a tin of smalti offcuts I've been carrying between studios for years for the same reason, and the honest count is I dip into it maybe once a season.
The part that stuck with me is you being good at this at work and not at home. Easier to be ruthless with someone else's object than with your own eye. Throwing out the encyclopedia is admitting that colour is gone for good, and the box is a way of not signing that paper.
The smalti tin is a good parallel. Offcuts you can't order again, so the tin is really a promise to yourself. Mine is the same, only paper takes up more room.
And yes. Someone else's object has an owner and a decision already made for you. My own eye has no one to answer to, so the box just keeps sitting there.