The Longer Version

So far, Facebook and Instagram have been where we’ve shared Sycamore Salvage. They’ve helped a little shop in Chickasha, Oklahoma, that opens one Saturday a month reach people we never would have met otherwise. We love those spaces, but they have also taught us to tell the shortest possible version of every story. Find the photograph. Write the caption. Squeeze as much feeling as possible into a few words and hope someone stops scrolling long enough to read them.

There’s just one problem with that: collectors are terrible at the short version.

Ask someone who loves old things about a piece in their house and you rarely get, “I bought it at an antique store.” You get where they found it, who they were with, what they paid, how they got it home and why they couldn’t leave without it. The object is only half the story, and after years of trying to fit those stories into captions, we decided we wanted somewhere to tell the other half.

It turns out, this might be a pretty good time to do it.

The way we discover places is changing. We still Google things and scroll social media, but now we also ask AI to plan a weekend, recommend a small town, find a great antique store or tell us where we should stop along the way. That makes having our stories out here on the open web feel more important, not less. We want someone planning a Saturday in Oklahoma to be able to discover Sycamore Salvage, but we also want them to discover Chickasha. We want them to know there is a reason to get off the interstate, shop with us, eat somewhere local, wander downtown, visit another small business and make a day of being here.

That brings us to who exactly is doing all this talking.

We’re Shelby and Jennifer Hurst. We grew up in Chickasha, we’re raising our two kids here, we both work full time, and we’re involved in our church and community. We are basically a typical American family who wants it all, or at least all the parts that make life interesting. Somewhere in the middle of everything else, collecting became one of those parts.

Sycamore Salvage is currently open one day a month on Second Saturday. That schedule started because real life required it, but we’ve grown to love the rhythm. We spend the weeks between openings hunting through antique stores, estate sales, Marketplace and anywhere else the good stuff might be hiding. Then we bring it all back to The Palace and start putting the pieces together.

We love antiques, beautiful new furniture worth keeping, heirloom-quality pieces, dishes, art, textiles, collectibles and the occasional thing we absolutely did not know we needed until we saw it. We like houses that reveal something about the people who live in them. Our own home is constantly changing because of that. We joke that our favorite vacation is simply enjoying our mortgage. Give us a free weekend, our three little dogs, something good to eat and a room that suddenly needs rearranging, and we’re pretty happy.

Apparently, even that wasn’t enough to keep us busy. We recently bought the little cottage across the street from The Palace, which has already given us more ideas than time to execute them. We’re calling it Sycamore Cottage, and you’ll be seeing plenty of it here as we figure out what it wants to become.

That is what we want this space to be.

Not another place we have to feed with content. Not shorter versions of things we already posted somewhere else. This is where we can tell you why we bought something, where we found it, what we learned, what we got wrong and why any of it mattered to us in the first place. We can talk about The Palace, the Cottage, our own home, Chickasha, places worth visiting, collecting, antiquing and whatever else we pick up along the way.

The internet certainly doesn’t need more generic content. There’s plenty of that already.

Maybe what it could use is more people telling stories about the places and things they actually know and love.

We know this place.

We love old things.

We usually have a project going that is slightly beyond our available time and common sense.

We should have plenty to talk about.

Welcome to the longer version.