Action at the Auction

I was beginning to feel discouraged about this buy/sell effort, 3 auctions in a row that were pretty rough. I tried again yesterday, and Pam and the boys even came along. They were quite the celebrities rolling around in the stroller checking everything out. Auctioning with babies is fun! I definitely couldn't have gotten anything done without Pam coming and taking care of the boys all day, thanks babe!

The auction itself was fun, it had a good reasonable mix of furniture, tools, antiques, and household stuff. Pretty high quality items, lots of cool things to check out, and a lot of pretty good deals. After a week of pretty limited success, I was ready to be a little bit more aggressive and hopefully get some good items for resale.

Time will tell, but I think we did well. At first the tools were going pretty high/not especially re-sellable. My brother and sister in-law recently purchased a house with some landscaping and needed a hedge trimmer, and I was able to buy a lot of three of them for $2 (one for them, two for the Project)! Once that happened, things started loosening up a bit. I bought a wooden step ladder, a decent looking bike rack, and a box of interesting old junk for $1 each. I accidentally overpaid ($10) for a pair of barstools (didn't put my hand down fast enough, rookie mistake!), but then got a REALLY cool old antique chair for $1 as the crowd thinned. In addition to that, I made the biggest purchase to date, a set of four solid oak antique chairs,  $45 for the set.

When we got home, I did a little research on some of the purchases. The $1 random box of junk yielded some small wooden boxes and other little collectibles, but the coolest items were two small, very old mechanical pencils, one of which looks like it's made out of silver! Also, the bike rack I grabbed for $1 is a Yakima, a premium brand, and they are $200++ new, so I might be able to get close to half that used. I think the chairs were an ok investment, I think the set could be worth $150 or more. Of course, we will still have to see what I can actually sell them for (and how fast). I listed most of the items on ebay (small stuff) and Craigslist (large stuff that's tough to ship), and will be trying on the local Facebook yardsale site as well.

Hopefully, I will be busy selling all of these items this week and turn some good profit. In total, I spent $61 at the auction, a pretty good chunk of the current project budget. I need to turn some of this into cash ASAP!

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates throughout the week, and maybe we can see some return on the investment soon.