Worth At Least
You might remember the auction in Romulus that kind of kicked off Sarah’s auction fever. Remember she bought that whole platter of dolls?
We ventured back to this auction a few Fridays ago. The wares looked really appealing.
We ran into a friend of ours at this auction and he was there scoping out some paintings. He thought they might be mega valuable, like tens of thousands, if they were real. Sarah and I explained to him that prices at this auction sometimes go really high (we saw a saxophone sell for $4,000 once). Really though, to us, “really high” means something goes over like $60. Our friend said he was willing to spend a couple grand on the paintings which made me be like 1. Are you secretly rich? 2. Why have you never told me you were secretly rich? and 3. Buy me those paper mache Santas because I don’t want to spend more than $50 on them.
[Spoiler alert: The paintings sold for over $2,000 each and our friend didn’t win any of them. The Santas went for over $200, and not to me.]
There were actually two auctions happening at this place at the same time. A back room was filled with all old, ceramic baby plates being auctioned off separately.
Here is a plate showing me on the day that I got chased by another dog while out walking George and then in anger called a man fat:
Sarah and I hung out in this baby plate room the most because items were selling really affordably. In the main auction room, things were quite different. You see, this auction is great because they have really nice things all the time. However, the auctioneer is, to be frank, super obnoxious.
He does this whole act with EVERY item in which he says, “Ok we got this [insert item] and clearly this is very old and it must be WORTH AT LEAST [insert some crazy high price].” This gets so frustrating because sometimes he doesn’t even know what an item is, and yet he makes up some fantastical price for it. And then the item always sells for around that price.
Kudos to him for having such a trustworthy audience, all of whom are going to be so sad when they do some research on ebay later.
Ok, so back in the baby plate room, I scored two items. Both of these are Roseville pottery, a brand I bought and sold recently. These plates came together in a lot that I paid $40 for. I am keeping the rabbit one for future baby’s room:
I love this because the rabbits kind of look like weird martian rabbits.
The second plate has chicks on it and I am going to list it on ebay:
Other than these two things, I didn’t buy anything else at the auction.
Sarah tried to buy some things but kept failing miserably. After the baby plate auction, a third separate auction started for a bunch of old postcards. There were literally thousands of postcards, all stored in huge albums. Each album was selling for $80-$200 each, depending on the content of the cards inside.
It was sad to watch. In my head I was cheering for Sarah, and visibly holding my breath each time she was bidding. But this SAME WOMAN each time would outbid her. This woman bought nearly every album and spent a ton of cash doing so.
There’s Sarah looking forlorn in the crowd. I wanted to yell out, “Come on! Just let her buy one!!” but there was a whole crowd of people wanting to just buy one album and they didn’t get to either.
It turns out that this woman owns an online store in which she scans vintage postcards that are past copyright and turns them into “new things”–probably prints them on a ton of sh*t. To be fair, this is a genius idea. Still though, she could have shared a little bit of the bounty.
-Erin
Update from Sarah: Before I get amped up with postcard talk, let me show you a few things that were cool at this auction that I did not purchase.
I’m really kicking myself for missing out on that sign because Adam realllllly liked it when I showed him the picture, and it would fit in very well in our kitchen.
That plate is so stinkin’ cute but I could not rationalize buying it because I do not have baby boys.
Giant shelf with tiny drawers? Yes, please!
These aren’t cool–they’re super ugly and look like ducks with alligator heads. But I think they were Roseville and I wanted to show them to you.
Ok, postcard time. What that lady does with her postcards is what Adam has been begging me to do with all of the paper goods I find that are past copyright. There is something about this that really bothers me and makes me feel bad–that I’d be turning someone’s old artwork into something mass produced. Also, in case you forgot, Adam–I have a full-time job. I don’t know–good for her. But it’s not something I’d want to do. Also, I actually felt hatred toward her while the auction was happening. I mean come on. These albums had HUNDREDS of cards in them each–do you really need 10,000 postcards?!
They were really cool cards and in very good condition. Here’s an example of why I wanted just ONE album to sort through.
Oh also at one point, when they were letting people choice out the albums of cards (there were so many albums that the auctioneer would say the winner had to take 4 or 5 at the high bid price) and she won, she looked at her loooong list of what she wanted and said, “Where’s 41? I want that one.” The auctioneer was like, “You already bought that one.” WTFFFFFFF?!!!!! Clearly, she didn’t even know what she did or didn’t have in her possession!
I wish we had gotten a picture of her because she had a little minion/friend with her who was in charge of her book full of notes about each album. Erin said that when we get older, that’s going to be us. But *I’m* going to be the a$$hole buying all the postcards. :(
I did end up buying two things. First was this baby plate with hounds running on it. I’m not sure why I wanted it so bad but I did, and it was only $20.
The second item was this set of baby plates that I really loved. Shockingly, Adam also really loved these.
So cute!
What Erin explained about this auctioneer is true. This experience really just made me not want to go to his auctions again. We had a surprise run-in with him the following week, though, which we will tell you about soon!