Going once! Going twice! ... SOLD!

My friend Kevin, my wife and I went to an auction this morning. A local apartment complex is scheduled to be demolished and they decided to auction off the contents of the apartments (most of them were furnished). Rather than pull everything out of over 150 units, they left everything in place and sold it by the room - you got everything between the sliding patio door and the entry door... appliances, furniture, window treatments, light fixtures, carpet, cabinets, whatever you wanted to move or remove. They also had a few items they sold seperately.

My wife had done a walk-around on Friday afternoon and had her eye on a table in one of the rooms, a wing-back chair in another room, and a couple of sofas. Beacuse of the way they ran the auction, she did not end up buying any of the rooms. She did, however, negotiate to purchase the table she wanted. She also talked to the person who bought the room with the wing-back chair and found out he was only interested in the appliances so he gave her the chair - he was going to leave it there to be demolished with the building anyway.

Some of the items they sold seperately were the contents of the management office. This included a decent sofa that Kevin bought for $1 - yes, one dollar. It wasn't something the wife and I were interested in and it's a sight lot better than the one he has. I also picked up four straight-back padded chairs for... get this... $5. Not each, for all four! They don't go with the table and they don't all match so slip covers are in order.

The big purchase of the day, though, was the networking equipment. The apartments were all wired for always-on internet. Apartment 101, in addition to being an apartment, was the central wiring hub for the network. They sold all of the equipment seperately.

First up were four 2-post telecommunications racks. One was about 4' high, the rest were 7' high. Kevin and I agreed that we would divvy up the racks since neither of us needed all four. Kevin was the only bidder and bought them for $10.

Then came the switches. There were several 24-port Cisco and Linksys switches in various places around the room. Two of the Linksys switches were still sealed in their original boxes. Bidding went back and forth on those a bit but I managed to snag all of them, as a lot, for $50.

Next up, they sold 3 computer monitors that we weren't interested in. After that, they sold two working computers that were both not even as powerful as my home system (which isn't very powerful at all by today's standards) and one parts machine... we passed on those too. Finally, they got to the cables. There were two boxes of ethernet cables and cabling, power cables, and various other items. Kevin snagged those for $5.

Now, here's the interesting thing. There were also 5 uninterruptible power supplies floating around the room. One was with the racks, one was with the switches, another was near the cables, and the other two were pretty much in the middle of the room... but they never auctioned them off specifically. As Kevin and I were sorting through our spoils and putting them all together in the corner, I asked the people that bought the computers if they were interested in any of the UPS units... nope. I snagged 'em all.

Then, as we were moving the boxes of cables, we found a laptop. I checked it when I got home and it's a 400MHz AMD system with a 4.3GB hard drive but it works! Kevin and I are going to have to determine who actually bought that.

Quick inventory:
1 short telecom rack
3. full-height telecom racks
1 APC 1400 rack-mount UPS
1 APC 700 rack-mount UPS
2 APC 500 individual UPS
1 APC 700 individual UPS
Several UPS replacement batteries
1 Toshiba 2100CDS laptop
1 leather Dell laptop case
7 Cisco Catalyst 2950 24-port 10/100 switches
1 Cisco Catalyst 2900 24-port 10/100 switch
1 Linksys 12-port 10/100 switch
7 Linksys 24-port 10/100 switches
1 Netgear 16-port 10/100 switch
1 3Com dual sped hub
1 350W ATX power supply
Dozens of surface-mount ethernet jacks
An a$$load of ethernet cables, power cables, ethernet cabling, power strips and other stuff we haven't had time to look at

Not bad for $65, eh?