Hammer Time: 400 Gallons of Paint

I was broke. Well let me rephrase that. I was a graduate student. So I guess you could say I was ‘comfortably broke’. My home was rented out to two other less broke students and I had plans to convert part of my garage into yet another bedroom so that I could hopefully get another $400 in monthly income. You could say that it was a beautiful time since I had a scholarship and no real responsibilities. But academia and me were not really meant to be. I had plans…

And none of it involved sitting in a class and listening to professor after professor talk about theories. The theoretical world of ‘how things should work’ was pretty much the dogshit of my program. You couldn’t help stepping in it and despite all the earnestness and goodwill of my education professors, I realized that their work wouldn’t have any genuine impact on any of us who were pretending to listen or the students they would later teach. Especially since everything they said was laced with the politics du jour (mostly PC, social justice and affirmative action for the 21st century). So like any arrogant student with too much free time I decided to pursue what I enjoyed.

Auctions. It was a complete addiction at that point. Every day I was combing through the classifieds and legals trying to find one. In the mornings I would visit the yard sales of the affluent and apathetic trying to find a good deal. Then I would sell it later that evening at auctions while taking my all too tolerant girlfriend out to enjoy it all. She actually did. It was fun to buy bikes, antiques (cheap ones), and jewelry that were uncoveted by one and see it competitively bid on by the many. But after a few months it just became mildly amusing work.

The kicker was when I bought 400 gallons of paint from a closed down Ace hardware store for $100. Nobody wanted to buy so much paint and it was being sold ‘all for one money’. As a young guy I couldn’t figure out why I got such a great deal along with a $20 paint color machine and a few $5 paint can shakers. I had the later two items sold within a few hours to an equipment wholesaler I knew. The profit would cover beer and groceries for the next few weeks. But what would I do with all that paint?

Well the first thing I had to do is stick as much as possible in the beat up old Camry. Pretty soon my car was a low rider with about 35 to 40 paint cans at a time placed in every odd angle. I had made a list of every weekly auction in North Georgia and rural Alabama and I proceeded to visit as many as possible with the paint in tow. The auctioneer gave me 30 days to get all of it out of the store and I was happy to oblige.

Most places made me a little money. Some didn’t even have more than two bidders. Then I found an equipment auction in Rockmart, GA and brought everything out there. Three hours of driving yielded only about 40 cans at a time. But pretty soon I got it all there for their big anniversary sale. I asked the auctioneer to sell it at ‘choice’ and then after everyone got their pick sell it for ‘times the money’ since I had realized by that time that most folks are not good with math. I was also dead bone tired from hauling around so many gallons of paint and wanted to get the best return for all that effort.

It worked… but not really. I made nearly $600 but I had spent at least four full days hauling, driving, unloading, and wasting gas on the whole deal. Surely there had to be a better way to make a living. Less than a week later I found one. It was a public auto auction in North Georgia. This was a time where about a third of the vehicles sold at public sales were actually good compared to the two to three percent of today. I bought a 13 year old Honda Civic for $500. Owned by a teacher who had traded it in for a Saturn (you could get ownership histories fairly easily at the time), the 1986 base model offered A/C, a radio, a four-speed manual and power nothing. It was perfect.

I borrowed a friend’s digital camera and spent about 15 minutes photographing it. Spent an hour typing up a glorious soliloquy of pithy summations and let Ebay do the rest. A week later it sold to a Polish PhD student from Emory, the very same school I was a student at, for $1576. No dead bone tired. No 16 hours worth of driving. Just a few pictures and a paycheck. From that moment forward I was transfixed on making any cheap beater car work for me.