After some early luck at the Buffalo farm house estate auction, we got hot dogs & chips and, like everyone else who hadn’t brought their own chairs or arrived by riding lawnmower, sat on (sturdy) chairs which would be up for auction later.

This is a dangerous thing. Not because of the age of the chairs, but because Derek knows I ought not be near the furniture. I have a terrible time not bidding on antique furniture because it sells for such a pittance I get ants in my pants. But we’re there now… Getting him started on a tour of all the long rows of furniture will be easy if I get him talking about it, so I point to a big I-don’t-have-a-clue-what-it-is and say, “What is that?”

With each step towards it, his intellect is further engaged and he becomes eager to explain to this city kid what every farm kid (his age & older, anyway) knows. “It’s a cider press,” he says.

What little I know of cider comes from jugs of it at the grocery store, so it’s fascinating to see how it once was made. Being mostly wooden, it’s quite impressive… And I begin to wonder what I could do with it… Dangerous thinking. Especially with curious children whose little fingers might like to play with those giant gears. So I look around to distract myself — I don’t have to look far.

Next to the antique cider press is a less attractive (to me) metal I-don’t-have-a-clue-what-it-is…

This is a cream separator — a De Laval Cream Separator, number 16, to be precise.

My city-kid-brain is beyond boggled. I’m more than a bit afraid he, a non-dairy farming farm-boy, will tell me things that I’ve managed not to learn having lived nearly 40 years in the dairy state of Wisconsin. So I point to a row of chairs and skip on ahead, leaving him to follow me. (I do have the bidding paddle, so he’s best off to know where I am at all times. *wink*)

As we stop and look at a section of not-so-well-cared for antique chairs I spot a real beauty. She’s in need of some serious work — everything from the frame to the upholstery needs help.

But just look at the lovely carved arms! I called them dragons, hubby called them lions; I said, “Dragons, lions, foo dogs — whatever. They are gorgeous.”

At my right I hear, “Isn’t that a pretty chair?” And soon we are chatting with a relative of the woman whose estate sale this is. First we talk chairs. She’s after a green & white antique chair, missing its caned seat (a bit of is is seen in the bottom right corner of the photo below). “I have one at home, given to me by her, with a plant in the broken seat. Chairs number two, three and four are here and I’m hoping…” she says. “Don’t bid on them, will you?” she adds hastily, wistfully. We assure her we won’t — and that we don’t have the room for all the lovely things we see here today, no matter how I wish it weren’t so.

“What will happen if it all doesn’t sell today?” I ask her. Her answer confirms my worst fears, “They’ll dump it, I guess.”

I’m sure my face conveys my horror. But there’s nothing hubby and I can do with our small home & even smaller wallets. But from here it’s easy to get hubby to stroll the big rows of antique furniture with me; it would be rude not to now.

We both admired this pretty antique hall mirror with green painted accents.

And it’s been quite some time since I’ve seen an old wooden wheeled service cart like this — complete with doily under the glass!

When Derek was taking this photo of an old ice box, a woman walking by asked, “Selling it on eBay already?” It was more of an accusation than a question. We both laughed because if we could afford to bid & win, we certainly wouldn’t have sold the old beauty. As a woman, I find such cubbyholes and storage possibilities too delightful, and the wood was just beautiful — what a wonderful, practical piece.

We hurried back to the auctioneer, so that we would be able to bid on that fourth trailer which had all the boxes of books we were interested in.

Back at the trailer area, we arrived in time to hear the auctioneer’s announcement that inside the house was an “antique ornate leather sofa” which they could not remove. It had been put into the old farm house back when the front porch was an open porch, but years later when the porch was made more functional as a walled-in addition, they had not found a way to get the old couch out of the house. “Buyer was responsible for its removal — and they could not hack a hole in the house to do so. Serious buyers should contact the staff or family to see it.” While I was dying to see it, I was not a serious buyer — not in terms of cash, and I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face at the buyer’s predicament either. *wink*

Now the bidding on the fourth trailer would begin.

Again, I remind you that we were up against some serious collectors and dealers here; we weren’t sure what we could hope for.

Long story short, we ended up winning a few rounds at “choice” bidding (in which you bid a rate per box, then get your choice of boxes — each times that rate). But the holy grail was when the bidding per box was at $5. The auctioneer then set the bidding to be for all the boxes which remained; at this point, that was about 1/3 of a eight foot wide by 12 foot long trailer. The auctioneer started the bidding at $25. No takers, so he lowered the start to $5.

Derek bid.

I held my breath as no one else bid… I was afraid to say anything — or even blink — for fear it would bring attention and another bidder. But going-going-gone! And we were the winners of all those boxes for just $5!

We should have — would have — taken a photo, but it was time to move all of that into the van. We had so sort books quickly (making over half a dozen boxes of Readers’ Digest Condensed books to donate on our way back into town), and pack and re-pack the boxes so that everything would fit. (Fifty plus flats of National Geographic magazines just had to be dumped loose between the seats, so that the two of us could fit inside the van too.)

While we did so we were asked the usual questions:

“What are you gonna do with all of that?”
“Do you own a book store — are you going to open a book store?”
“Do you sell online?”

(Apparently no one believes us when we say we read and love books, so the questions kept coming.)

The van was packed to capacity.

Not just the inside, but the weight. Look how low the van sat with all that weight.

By the time we were done, we were hotter than heck — but our glow wasn’t just from our sweat. We were beaming with excitement & looking forward to rummaging through our new loot. (We’ll be sure to share the details of all the books, including at least 5 different sets of antique encyclopedias, with you in the future.) It was enough to make me, temporarily, forget about not being able to stick around for the furniture sales.

If this day was a MasterCard ad, it would look something like this:

Lunch: $6
Winning bids at auction: $72
Day with hubby: Priceless

PS The $6 lunch now seems a ridiculous price to pay… I wonder what part of a trailer — or a furniture lot — we might have got for that? If we only had the room…

PPS I had a dream that night that the lady we met at the auction called me & told me that all the unsold furniture was still on the lawn — the junk man would be by to burn it and scrap it later in the week. If we wanted anything, we should come get it. I really wish I had given her my number… Just in case.

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Article Tags: antique chairs, antique cider press, antique cream separator, antique furniture, antiques, auction bidding, auction stories, buffalo nd, dairy collectibles, Thursday Thirteen

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 2:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized, collecting fyi, flea market finds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.