Month: September 2012

Yesterday, Vero’s family and I went to a public auction run by Tru Liquidators. Vero and I have our eye on a few items for the house and wanted to see how an auction was run.

All in all, I was quite impressed.

It started out with a preview hour from 12-1PM. That wasn’t entirely exciting. We were expecting a lot more stock in the showroom, but in hindsight, an auction would take days if they had a warehouse full of stuff.

There literally is THAT auctioneer who rambles on some prices…”Do I have fifty, fifty, fifty, blah blah blah, how about forty, forty, forty?”. It was interesting to see him at work. They start out at a high price, then it drops, drops, drops, and then when people start bidding, it comes back up to a reasonable price in most cases.

From our viewpoint, 90% of the stuff sold was a good deal. There were three piece leather sofa sets selling for $1,000. There was also a 65” Panasonic TV that sold for $1,700. While I didn’t think it was a great deal, I checked Future Shop and they lowest price they have for a Panasonic of this size is $3,000. So that’s pretty good savings!

I also liked how sometimes they had multiple sets of an item so if the knife set was won at $30 they ask if anyone else wants a set at that price? In fact, a sofa set went for $2,000 but then they had three more that they didn’t want to bring back to Toronto so they dropped the price to $1,500! All were snatched up.

There’s a 10% buyers premium and I’m wondering if you have to pay taxes on the item as well. But all in all, we were impressed of how it played out…not ENTIRELY impressed with the selection. The only thing that piqued our curiosity was the sofa sets but we don’t know if we’ll like leather.

Labour Day weekend used to mean awesome parties at Matt’s cottage…but no more!  (actually, not for a long time now!).  This year was spent staining the deck in the backyard.  A much needed project and it shaped up to be a great weekend to do so.

Vero’s dad was on hand to help me do the bulk of it and Vero helped out as well when she wasn’t making some lovely lasagna with Danielle.  I started out Saturday morning with an alarm clock of 7:30 only to realize that the deck was soaked from the night before!  Argh…what a waste.  But I used the time to clean up the garage a little bit and stumbled upon a few items I’ve been looking for.

Around 11AM we started staining the rails around the entire deck.  We also sent Vero and Danielle out for another gallon of stain as well as a sprayer.  Gaetan said that the sprayer worked amazingly well with some sealer he used before so I figured we should give it a try on the planks.  Unfortunately, the stain was way too thick for it and it was more of a pain to have someone spray the stain and the other try and backbrush it with the brush.  PLUS it was around 2PM so the boards were HOT so as soon as you put some stain onto it, it just sucked it up.  If you didn’t get to it in ten seconds, you were in for trouble!  I wonder if it was also the fact that there was little to no stain left on these boards that contributed to it absorbing fast?

Either way, after some mishaps with the sprayer, we opted to have Gaetan roll it on the deck and I backbrushed it.  This was amazing simple and effective.  A few hours later, the deck was done and looking pretty fine!  I continued the evening with touching up little things like the flower boxes and whatever I could find.  I also had to buy ANOTHER gallon of stain.  In hindsight, it would take five gallons of paint to do the deck which comes out to $225 to stain the entire thing.

The next day we added another coat of paint to the floorboards but opted out of staining the rails again.  Unfortunately for me, I waited a few hours and walked across the boards and Vero noticed that my feet left some marks.  I guess the night before wasn’t a big issue since a) it was absorbed by the wood a lot more b) there was another coat going over top of it anyhow.  So at this point, it’s a waiting game of 72 hours before I set foot on them boards again and I may have to touch up a few portions.

That’s where I am left now…95% done and I have to get a few sides of the hot tub and some lattice.  The lattice was quite simple to stain with Gaetan and I having a good system down of rolling it on and then brushing it in.

2 full days of work and a little left over to do, Vero and I are really excited with how the deck looks now.  Not sure how long it will last but it is worth it.