o the auction ran today. (Click here for a review of the building materials auction.)I was looking for some fencing for the horse pastures. We need at least 650 feet.
It was busy today. A lot of people looking for deals. I got there around 9:15am to scope out what was going to run today. They had some good stuff up for bid.
There was a lot of fence, and lumber. I tried to put in a bid on a pallet of 2x6's, but it got too rich for my blood in a hurry.
They also had a small tractor with a roto-tiller that didn't sell. I asked Danny, the guy that runs the place, how much they wanted for it. They needed $2600 to let it go. Would have been a deal if it had a front end loader, but it didn't - so that was the end of that.
I had called ahead during the week, but the woman who helped me out wasn't that well versed in fencing - so I knew that they had some, but that was about it.
This is the auctioneer - he was running the building materials. If you haven't been to an auction before, a few suggestions. Look in the book and circle or star the items you're interested in. Then see if they're selling it by the unit or for the whole lot. For the fence, you bid on the price per roll. But sometimes, he would have the bid a whole pallet of lumber or pipe. Also, watch out for "phantom bidders." Once there is a bid on something, they sometimes try to get more money by bidding you up against a phantom. "$20 - $30...$30?" Well if you're the high money, make sure there really is a guy at $30, and you're not just bidding against the house. I was bidding against one guy. He had no idea what he was doing. It cost me about $5 a roll to drop him, but I won the bid on the 5' horse fence for $40 a roll. I took the whole pallet. At this auction, they allow you to name the number of rolls you want if you're the high bidder. It seemed like about 700 feet, so I took it all.
Mine's that pallet in the middle. My neighbor got a bunch of the 6' fence, and I helped him install a few hundred feet of that. It seemed a bit too high, so I'm glad we got the 5'. It's really thick guage stuff. My total was $600.52. The auction has a 15% fee, and there is sales tax.
But the cool thing is, if I went down to the local ranch supply place, these go for $224.99 per roll. So my bill would have been at least $1600. Maybe more, I might have over 700 feet... It's hard to tell with the auction rolls. I have 13 rolls, but they're not all 100 footers. I'm assuming that these are at the end of a spool of wire at the factory, or there's a minor defect. I'll take a bent wire here or there to save $1000.
Now the fun part, loading it in the truck and taking it home.
There were a few guys that helped us out at the auction, so the load in wasn't too bad. We got the perfect amount of rolls, we could not have gone one more in there. I also stopped by the Shucks an picked up a ratchet tie down. We had a man killed by an unsecured load last year... Don't want to have that happen.Well, I was by myself for the unload - funny how that happens. My neighbor had to go take care of a busted pipe in his septic system at a rental house, so it was up to Rancher Ron to man handle this one.
I just have to get it from the back of the truck to that cement slab... doesn't seem too hard. Lucky for me, I have one of these:
So I just pressed my easy button, and...
That was easy.
I did have one issue, I recently had some stuff stolen out here at the ranch, so I wanted to lock this fence down. I went up to our local hardware store and had Tom the hardware guy make me a 25' steel cable.
It was about $7.50 cause we made it there. The prepackaged cables were a lot more.
I just fed it through all the outside bundles of fence, and ran it through fence by the slab and slapped a lock on it.
So now I'm going to see if I concentrate real hard and hit that easy button again, if the fence will install itself along the horse pasture?
~Rancher Ron
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