A brief night at the auction

Since our current riding lawn mower is dying a slow death and the grass is getting a little taller, we stepped up the pace looking for another one.

We checked out a number of options. Do we get:

• an upgrade to the one we have
• one similar to the one we have
• one that will work but is a little clunkier

We have a little under an acre now, so a replacement with about the same blade size would be good. Zero turn radius would be really nice (an upgrade) but these are expensive. We have a hydrostatic-drive mower, so a manual-shift mower might be a downgrade. The case for a new, zero-turn radius mower is a weaker because we may be decreasing the amount of land we have with the purchase of another house; we probably wouldn't need something that big if we go down to a 1/4 acre.

An auction in town had a couple of riding lawn mowers for sale. We checked them out, and decided to bid on a Craftsman 46″, 18.5 HP gear-shift riding lawn mower. We remembered the cheapie ones at Wal-Mart were about $800, so we figured if we could get this one for under $600 we were doing all right.

Our final bid was $500 + 10% buyer's premium + tax, which came to about $577.

My wife was a little leery of the manual-shift version, but my father-in-law says that the hydrostatic-drive motors have their own set of problems. He was “happy to hear” that we got a manual-shift mower.

We have to wait to use it until Monday because it's just a little too tall to fit in our mini-van, so we arranged for a friend with a truck to help us get it.

So anyway, we didn't stay for the rest of the auction. Enough damage for one evening!

It still remains to be seen whether we made a wise choice or not. I haven't tracked down how old this model is, but the manual was printed in 1995. I'm willing to take a chance on it in exchange for paying less than half the price of a comparable new one.

At least I'm better at fixing them now!

Update:  Here's the real reason why it was so cheap …