Day 5 - Building Auction!

So after a harrowing journey up to Baltimore in the form of a delaminating front tire on the truck, Erik and I arrived up at the building materials auction ready to find some deals.

Erik prepped me on the way up (betwen trips to tire stores and gas stations) for what we were about to experience, but it didn't really sink in until we got there. First off, this place is HUGE. There are 5 warehouses linked together with everything from windows (our main objective) to doors, cabinets, appliances, tile, vacuum cleaners, small appliances, garage storage, etc. The location was as sprawling as the choices.


There items were along the walls and divided into rows 100 yards deep. This was doors, appliances and random building materials.


Here are carved solid marble fireplace mantles. These were easily 20K a piece to have made, but at Southern Sales, they went for the starting bid - $2000 each. I'm not sure how big your house has to be exactly to warrant 6 foot tall marble sculptures, but our plans didn't account for them.


One of 5 seperate aisles of windows we were in the market for. Each aisle had roughly 500 windows each of every shape and size.


Another row of cabinets and patio doors. I am not sure how you would go about outfitting a kitchen with mix and match cabinetry, but you could do it for dirt cheap here.

Here is Erik with the very useful clipboard/window-size list on which we used to base our efforts (though it made at least 6 people comeup to ask questions assuming that we worked there).

A huge pile of $800 kitchenaid built in microwaves. At Southern Sales - $85 a pop.

I bought 9 windows - list price of at least $5000 for around $1000. All the windows I bought were low-e, argon filled, double paned units that carry a name brand. The best purchase of the day came in the form of a three-window combonation unit, solid wood, by Pella - easily $2000 list price- that I picked up for $275.


So after a brief side trip to the Firestone service center in Federal Hill (and a local watering hole where we waited for four new tires for the truck), we loaded up the haul and made our way back to DC. A twelve hour day, but it was a lot of fun and certainly a great local find to cut some cost.

The digging crew was hard at work while we were up in Baltimore, so the next two updates will show some real progress!