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Inspired by the ebay bargain thread.... what old bits of tat have you chucked on ebay and been amazed when someone is willing to pay good money to take it off your hands?
I had my house refurbed a couple of years ago and the builder took our 2 huge but really old double glazed windows. They were going to take up half a skip, so I chucked 'em on ebay & some geezer bid £50 and took them away.
I'm also really surprised at the demand for broken household appliances. Sometimes ebay just saves you a trip to the dump!
old camping (paraffin) stove of my dad's. £50 !!
And an 8 year old Mac mini, £100 for that.. not that I'd have chucked it, but when a new laptop is 250/300 for reasonable quality and great spec..
An old aluminium-cased Sony Walkman, over £30 bought by someone in Canada!
Not sure it even worked so didn't claim such in the advert 🙂
A broken 8 year old washing machine, sold for £50.
I have no idea what the fella wanted it for but he was delighted when he came to collect it!?!!
1 left hand XL ladies Harley Davidson glove found in my front garden on a rainy day.
got around £10 from someone in Germany.
🙂
An ancient "Shiver and Shake" Xmas special comic I found in my mum and dads loft, went for £23, i nearly fell off my chair. The weirdos asking if I had any more "Commando" comics to sell freaked me out a bit though.
Not so much tat, but sold some mouldy bucket seats from my project mini that i wasn't going to use. The bloke came to collect, then promptly bought the mini, and a load of my collected parts for way more than i paid for it.
The missus was happy...
An old Ikea kitchen; they drove from Bristol to Leeds, pretty much destroyed it trying take it out then handed over £700 having placed uncovered in a trailer while it p***ed it down
Years ago I wanted to sell some bits and pieces but ever having sold on eBay before I wanted a test run. Put an old shoe horn that came free a pair of Base loafers, plan was my chum would bid and win at £1, pay via PayPal and id give him cash (just to see how everything worked) described it as a "designer shoe horn" with a daft description. Ended up with a bidding war between 4 idiots, selling for just shy of £10.
To test the theory that people really are stupid, I later sold a Selfriidges paper carrier bag for several pounds.
I once sold two twiglets that were fused into the shape of a guitar. I think I got around £1.50 for it. Plus there was a thread on guitartrackworld discussing precisely which model of guitar it most resembled.
I've been extremely pleased with my Twiglet guitar, thank you very much.
Knackered Elixir, sold with accompanying text making it clear it was broken and for spares/repair only - £70.
I though this was good work...
Andy
Not me personally but a pal of mine had his house refurbed, he had mint condition stained glass windows all round, i told him to get them encapsulated inbetween new double glazed units, as people go nuts for them and they go for a lot of money 2nd hand his wife however hated them and didnt believe me, so his wife in all her wisdom rang a joiner, windows removed and new fitted, on finishing the job the joiner met a guy outside my pals house and handed over all of the glass wrapped in sheets, and a "chunky" envelope was exchanged, he later found out by browsing ebay that his windows went for a cash sale from ebay for 2k, and the pictures on ebay were while the old windows were still insitu before the joiner started, he was not impressed. And its still brought up at gatherings to this day.
A 1994 Mercedes T1 (the van before the sprinter). I'd bought it with tax and mot a year previously for £350 and was selling without tax, or mot, or much steering to speak of and with quite a lot of diesel bubbling out of the injector seals. Get a few bidders at scrap value then at the last minute it gets bid up to £345 which made me quite happy.
Look to see who the bidder is and they are based in Germany - heart sinks a little. He emails me to arrange pickup and he has a Nigerian name. Heart sinks a lot - no feed back, arse this looks like a scam. Decide to let things run to see what kind of scam the guy is trying to pull. But there was nothing dodgy going on, the guy was sound if a little lacking in common sense, the guy flies form Germany to Edinburgh, train from Edinburgh to Glasgow, I take him to a Post Office and he changes his euros for stirling, pays me then has to drive the van to Newcastle, get a ferry and what cost he didn't know, and drive across Holland back to Germany. All in with flights, ferry and diesel it must have cost him at least and £500 - £600 and two days travel to collect it
Grans kitchen, utterly hideous, bright orange, classic 70's. Very skippable. £700 on eBay and removed carefully - bought by a film company looking for a set.
Ancient computer processor, graphics card and case went for just over £100 all in. All of it about 6 years old too.
lost track of the amount of crap i`ve got rid of on there, stuff that i thought was rubbish and made good money.
I was at the dump chucking some rubbish and a guy was just about to bin one of those retro tv/radio combo's from the early 80's, the one's with the big handles. I asked him politely if he intended to chuck it, he said yes and that he'd be happy for me to have it if I thought that it would be of some use to me. It certainly wasn't, but the 50 pounds I got for it on Ebay the next week was. The guy at the council dump had a bit of a go at me, but the way I saw it he was going to bin it, it was in his car and nothing to do with him, sour grapes!
Pretty much anything 'retro' gets top dollar from the crazys and hipsters.
Not eBay sales, but the absolute s*** you can get rid of on freecycle amazes me every time I need a clear out.
And you meet some very "interesting" characters.
I sold (for a mate I must stress) a pinky orange Halfords tiger stripe XC skinsuit (not just used but raced in extensively eeurgh) for £18.
And some guy in Germany paid silly money for an old (but unused) Ultegra double group set I had ripped off my road bike years ago when I applied a triple, stuck in the cupboard and forgot.
ten year old hope m4 disk brakes, no rotors but a new pair of superstar pads and got £110.
They were scratched and needed bleeding.. listed all this in description but someone wanted them badly.
Very broken dishwasher - £85. Almost identical new (ex-display) bought for £110.
Old fishtank, almost binned, decided to EBay, £45.
Ohh, and a Hallowe'en costume bought new for £8, sold second hand for £10.
Put the wife's Micra on after the CPU stopped working. Got £750 for it when Ford were only going to give us £1000 for it as a part x when it was working. The lad that bought it phoned me 2 weeks later to say that he had to pay £1500 for Nissan to get the car started! Mental. We were happy.
Sure you were. The guy that bought it cant't have been. Sleep tight.
Plastic kayak, complete with 8" crack in the hull. £130 - saved me a trip to the dump!
Sold a picture of a mate holding a fish he had caught. I advertised it under "of gay interest" sold for £1.99.
Bargaintastic
used cloth nappies - had done 3 kids - £30 or so
someone got a good deal actually
Sold a radio controlled fart machine that I got as a present a few yrs earlier for £22. Think you could buy them new for about £7.
We also bought a 're-usable nappy kit' from Boots for £4 that should have been about £280 but they were getting rid of them. My sis was with child at the time & we thought it was worth the risk of getting one in case she wanted one.
She didn't want it, so we stuck it on eBay and it sold for £180!
johndoh - Member
Sure you were. The guy that bought it cant't have been. Sleep tight.
We sold it as a non starter as it wouldn't even turn over. He knew full well what he was getting himself into. He was also a part time trader trying to make a quick profit.
Go and judge somebody else you nobber.
Sold a picture of a mate holding a fish he had caught. I advertised it under "of gay interest" sold for £1.99.
lol, really? Genius.
2 slightly chipped really nasty cast iron (I think) fireplace surrounds. They were really cheap looking, possibly from mid 30s, nothing like nice Victorian ones. Covered in lashings of diarrhea brown paint. Would have put them in the skip, but it got picked up before I put them in. £70. Over the moon!
How much do you reckon I'll get for a 1970's bottle of Woodpecker cider?
Never opened and is in good condition?
Grum, yep totally true. He didn't find it too funny at the time but thankfully now laughs about it.
Sold a dog-eared copy of a Pete Loveday comic. I somehow ended up with two copies of Russel meets The Levellers. It went for £25 🙂
It cost me about £3 direct from the distributors. Felt a little guilty but Googled the comic title and the first result was a link where you could buy the comic for about £3 😐
Bike related one, someone bought a Raceface stem top-cap for £16! £16! The whole headset had only cost me £20.
Loads of guitar stuff... Probably best one was, I bought an early 90s fender for £350, replaced all the pickups in it as they were crap, cost about £200 all in. Sold the original ones (with accurate description) for £190. Feller was really excited to be able to restore his guitar to be horrible-sounding.
I had some 5 foot tall tree stumps left, (13 I seem to remember) from removing a load of conifer roots from the bottom of my garden. Put them on e-bay for 1p, buy it now and a bloke turned up a few days later to remove them for me. Brilliant! Even offered me the cash!
Miniature steam engine, ebayed because it was just to neat to skip, £350 ........amazed, 15 bidders 90 watching, it went crazy in the last couple of minutes bidding.
A friend of my parents knew I did a lot of scuba diving and so gave me a heavy old chrome dive torch that had been given to her husband. It barely put out a glimmer of light and would have been more useful for clubbing things to death than as a torch. I kept it for a few years (never got it wet) then eventually got fed up of it cluttering up the cupboards so stuck it on ebay where it sold for £220 plus shipping to the USA. Seems it was a rare early model made by Siebe-Gormann.
An original Aston Martin DB2/4 Owners Handbook, which I sold for £200, although was a bit annoyed to see it up for sale at Coys a few months later with a guide price of £1000.
It was part of a motoring book collection I paid £200 for, I sold the books I didn't want for approx £1000, and kept the rest.
Those Suntour pedals are lovely! I've just sold 2 matching rear hubs for a song though 🙁
Lovely kit that old XC Pro 🙂
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As we were doing our house up over the last few years I've got money for some stuff Mrs PP wanted to chuck or give away. We had an Ikea bed we were given. Nice but too big and hard for us (fnarr fnarr) She thought I was cheeky getting £75 collected for it!
We sold a cheap fridge (newish) for only about £30 less than what we paid for it to a bloke that wanted it to put in his hair salon to keep milk in. He came round in a massive BMW 4x4 to pick it up.
The best one was the electric cooker. It was a 10+ year old Belling free standing thing that cremated anything you put under the grill or in the oven and due to the electric hob was impossible to simmer anything on. Mrs PP wanted to take it to the tip but I got £100 collected on for it! 🙂
They don't call it 'Fleabay' for nowt.....
I had been given an old '70's Raleigh racing frame when I was a teenager, and after various build guises it had been used for couriering for a summer and then riding to and from work. Had been heavily crashed at some point with a large kink in the downtube resulting in a steeper head angle than it had left the factory. Painted in Hammerite and rust, lots of insulation tape, half handlebars, single brake, fixed rear wheel etc.
I had just bought a Langster brand new in a sale, and was amazed that I managed to flog this ancient steel deathtrap (with an accurate description) for about £30 less than the brand new Specialized!
I met the guy off the train with it and he was delighted with his purchase 🙂
Cheers, Rich
I took a reproduction spiral staircase out of my old house. It must have weighed a ton. It was 10 years ago now, but IIRC correctly I sold it on eBay for about £1,500 being 80% of the price of a new one from the factory. Chuffed.
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When me and the mrs bought our first house we had a bit of work to do digging out the massively over-grown rockery in the front garden. There were some rocks but mostly it had been built up with lumps of broken concrete that sort of resembled rocks. Having done three-quarters of the garden we had about 2 tons of it sitting on the drive. Would have cost loads to hire a skip, so I put it on ebay and even stated that I suspected most of it was concrete. Started at 1p or something, whatever the lowest starting bid is, as I just wanted someone to take it away so I didn't have to hire that skip.
Went for £50 in the end. We were on holiday when the auction ended, but I emailed the winner and told him it was in a pile on the drive and to help himself. He rang as he was collecting, saying he'd noticed that the last quarter of the garden hadn't been dug out yet, but looked to have more stone/concrete, could he have that too? I said yes and so he finished digging the garden for us while we were away and carted off all the rubble. And we were £50 up - bargain!

