At auction this week, I didn’t see much in the way of vintage on the tables, so I bought for my house. Functional and utilitarian items that could make my life easier.
I was standing outside, watching disinterestedly as the auctioneer sold off boxes of items I couldn’t use: books, glassware, electric hedge clippers. Then he mentioned that some of those items were part of a bigger lot from one household, the rest of it piled on tables inside: new bathroom towel sets, comforters, a paper shredder, foot spas and more.
I perked up. My shredder had died on me, and if I could get one for $5, I’d do it. So I went inside and found the shredder on a table that I had checked out before. I had completely missed it, perched there at the back of the table. The Tech Solutions TS4500 shredder was in the original box, foam packaging still around it. It wasn’t a heavy-duty shredder – it only shredded seven sheets of paper (crosscut) at a time – but it could work for me.
The shredder was among four household items I saw that I could use in my home. Here are the others:
A small stool for my desktop computer’s CPU. The unit sits under my desk on what has now become a rickety and unstable stool, made that way because it is so heavy. On one of the auction tables, I came across a sturdy tightly woven old wooden stool about 10 inches tall, the right height. Unfortunately, another bidder had her eye on the stool and three pieces of silver-plated serving dishes that she had combined as a lot. We bidded the items up to $15, way more than the $5 they should have fetched. (I had asked the auctioneer to separate the stool from the silver-plates, but he was in a testy mood and didn’t. So I ended up with all of it.)
A Stangl salad/serving bowl in the Carnival pattern. The bright pink and green colors (Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority colors, in fact) and a crazy design endeared me to it. It was a big beautiful bowl, large enough to hold food to feed an army (it’s actually a foot wide.)
The main item for me was a Shaker-style rocking chair. I’m a Southern and we have a thing for rocking chairs and porches, and all the nostalgia that go with the image. The rocking chair was dark wood, stained, with a tightly woven seat. It sat majestically on top of a table in the furniture room in the back of the auction house. I hung around waiting for it to come up, wondering if I would be out-bidded. I did get into a back-and-forth bidding war but I got the chair for $35. It looks great on my enclosed porch. All it needs now is a comfortable pillow for the seat (and also to cover up what looked like accidental drops of dark stain that someone had tried to remove).
Auctions (and flea markets) are not only a good bargain for vintage and antique items but also for household goods.
Oh, I got the shredder for $6. Should’ve been 5, but someone else wanted it, too.
