Nathaniel Weaver will graduate from Youngsville High School this week.

He won’t be going to college or headed off on a fancy vacation after graduation. The 18-year-old Pittsfield native will be heading to Chandler’s Valley to open his antiques store.

Weaver bought the store — now called “Nathaniel’s Nostalgia” — last fall. Well, that’s when he cut the check.

The check was to hold the business until he turned 18 and could take it over.

“I’ve just always loved antique stores,” said Weaver. “Yard sales, estate sales… I’d always make my father pull over when we saw a yard sale so I could look at stuff.”

Weaver has always had a fascination for the long-forgotten minutiae and gadgets found in antique stores. Not only that, he loves the people who work there.

“They’re just really interesting people,” said Nathaniel. “They’re a cool style of people. Really happy, happy with what they do. They’re interesting. They’re unique. I just always knew I wanted to be like them when I grew up.”

By “like them,” Nathaniel said he means passionate, fascinated, and full of interesting historical information.

“I’d ask, ‘what’s this’ or ‘what’s that,'” said Nathaniel of his childhood antique shop finds, “and they’d always know. It was so interesting to learn what all the things were for.”

Weaver said he loves the random things one can find at a castaway sale, whether it’s in an antique shop, at a garage sale, or even at an estate sale or flea market.

“I like random,” he said. “Random is cool.”

Weaver said he would do all of his gift shopping at antique shops, even as a child. Candy dishes for grandmothers. Christmas gifts for his parents and his brother.

“It’s just more personal,” Weaver said of his interest in finding just the right unique treasure for the person on his list.

His fascination with antiques — and the historical context from which they hail — includes “anything unique,” he said. But his main interest when it comes to antiques is mid-century furniture — created between the late 1940’s and the late 1950’s. It’s a popular genre of furniture everywhere, and it’s widely available at an affordable price point.

That’s handy for Weaver, who said he has new items coming into the store in Chandler’s Valley weekly. Yes, that store. The one on Jackson Run Road between Warren and Sugar Grove, with the porch full of vintage goodies six months out of the year.

It was last fall, Weaver said, when he was surprised to hear that the current owner was headed out of the business.

“She was selling it,” said Weaver, “and it was affordable. So I bought it.”

Just like that, Weaver decided to forego his plans to get an accounting degree, swayed his parents to let him cash in his college fund, and put down the cash for the building.

“My mom almost fell on the floor,” said Weaver, when he told her what he wanted to do with the money set aside for college.

His father tried to talk him out of it.

“‘What are you thinking,'” Weaver said his father asked him.

Eventually, Weaver said his parents came around.

“They’re happy if I’m happy,” said Weaver.

His brother, he said, finds the antiques scene far less compelling than Weaver does.

“But I hope as he gets older he’ll start to appreciate it,” he said.

Weaver said that he opened the store last fall but decided to make it a six-month-a-year venture, closing for the winter months to remodel and paint the store, and to collect treasures from around the state. He plans to reopen each spring, he said, or by appointment for anyone interested in perusing his selection. He’s already had that phenomenon familiar to anyone running a yard sale happen to him; he showed up at his store just a bit later than his posted opening time to find a few people waiting outside for the doors to open.

He’d come across a yard sale on the way to the store, and couldn’t help but stop and have a quick look. The crowd awaiting his arrival at the shop was a pleasant surprise, he said.

Weaver said he has a wide selection of glassware, midcentury and parlor furniture including tables and dressers, Fenton glassware, Victorian furniture and knick knacks, and other items as well.

He also plans to open a greenhouse and garden center behind the store. He tried a greenhouse operation in a shed at his home a few years ago, but it didn’t fly. This time, he said, he’s prepared.

“I’m building my own greenhouse out of windows from the Hamilton mansion in Ripley, N.Y.”

He’d stopped for — what else — an estate sale, and discovered that they were remodeling several of the windows in the structure. He bought everything they were getting rid of and will be putting together the greenhouse this year.

He plans to sell perennials and annuals, as well as vegetables and general gardening supplies.

The store and greenhouse, said Weaver, “is my escape. If I’ve had a bad week at school or I’m stressed, I just go to the store and work at remodeling or painting, just sweeping it up, and all the stress just disappears. It’s my own little world in there.”

A little world — Nathaniel’s Nostalgia at 9339 Jackson Run Road from April through November — into which he’d like to invite fellow antique lovers like himself.