A Day in the Life by Paty Jager

This past Saturday, hubby and I went to an auction 30 miles from our house. It was a farm auction. The older couple couldn't keep up with their land and had sold out to move to a smaller place closer to family. There was 40 years worth of junk and some good stuff.

Hubby went with the idea of finding "treasures" to him, junk to me, but spare parts for our farm machinery. I hadn't planned on buying anything. I had finished one book and had uploaded the next to be released and needed a day away from the computer and to let my mind wander to anything but writing.

We met our friends, another couple we do things with. She grabbed me and said, "They are also having a garage sale." So I wandered through the furniture, mostly refurbished from old crates and furniture and made into new things, like I watch on Flea Market Flip. In the garage were tables of Fall and Christmas decorations and lots of craft items. Only mostly crafts I don't dabble in. So I didn't find anything at the garage sale.

Hubby and I walked down to the equipment. We saw a couple of items that if they went for cheap, we'd try for. Then a neighbor called and asked hubby to bid on a van trailer for him.

They had started auctioning the items in the shop, so we wandered back. Hubby didn't see anything in there he wanted until he had his own shop to put it in. I had looked over the saddles and didn't care to bid on them. But when they got down to the saddle blankets there were two I wanted to make rugs out of.  When the first person won the bid at $20 and they picked the blankets they wanted and didn't take the two I liked, I was getting anxious. Then they bid again and someone took more blankets for $10. Still not the ones I wanted. Then the auctioneer said whoever wins the bid gets the round up. I didn't know what that meant but when I bid $5 and no one else bid, they said I won the round up. I started to pull out the two blankets I wanted and the auctioneer said, "It's all yours." So I packed off 3 full body blankets, that I'm cleaning and will have our friend sell. 2 pony bare back pads. Same thing.  The 2 blankets I wanted and 5 other pads. Which I will see what I want to keep and have our friend who sells used tack, sell the rest.

full body blanket

bareback pads

We put all the blankets in the pick up and drove down the road to the Narrows Cafe. Had lunch and went back to find them auctioning the farm equipment. They had told hubby they wouldn't get to it for a couple of hours. They'd changed their minds. We ended up with a three point hitch (brand new) for $5, a cultivator hubby plans to cut in half and make into two. One for me to use to dig up the packed dirt in the corral and one to sell, for $100. And we both fell in love with a small grain roller. We got that for $20. And he picked up the van the neighbor wanted for less than he'd expected to pay.

They went back up to the stuff on a flat bed trailer. It is getting to be later afternoon and people had been hanging around the trailer all day waiting for the boxes of stuff on it to sell. Hubby had his eye on a bunch of tips for the cultivator and I found two drawers from a wooden cabinet with slotted dividers that I could envision made into shelves for my pig collection.

They started the bidding to take your pick of the boxes on one section of the trailer. It didn't have anything we wanted. Then they moved to the section with the drawers I wanted. They started with Your pick for $20. No one took my drawers. The bid was at $10 to take what you wanted, but hubby held me back. Luckily no one went for the drawers and I got both for $5. And one had nuts in it hubby could use and the other had metal files. Then we moved to the section with the tips. A man stood with his foot up on the trailer right next to them, kind of hiding the bundle. We were behind him. Hubby heard the man tell his friend when they got to $12.50 he was going to take them. So hubby bid $15 and grabbed the bundle out from under the man's leg.

drawers I'll remake into shelves

We were home by six and unloaded the blankets and my boxes. The heavy stuff we unloaded the next day.

Now I have blankets to clean and boxes to transform. But those tales will be for another day.