Do-it-yourselfers can’t resist

Steve Marcus

Visitors to the liquidation auction of a door manufacturer size up the doorknobs and other wares Tuesday as auctioneer Dave McCormack, in back, and his wife, Kris, lead the selloff. Bargains abound at such events, said one attendee: “If you spend every day at Home Depot, you know what all this stuff costs. You would be amazed.”

By Brendan Buhler

Thursday, April 16, 2009 | 2 a.m.

A chipped and hole-pocked utility table is loaded with door handles, knobs and hinges, some in their original packaging, some not. Another half-dozen tables hold more of the same, plus screws, screens, air tool lubricant, fire extinguishers, paints, power window openers — all of it being sold in bulk lots.

Thomas Ledbetter is dipping into these piles like a man browsing through the produce section for dinner and wondering if he really wants a potato. But at these prices, it’s hard to resist.

Ledbetter regards a hinge.

“If you spend every day at Home Depot, you know what all this stuff costs. You would be amazed,” Ledbetter says.

He’ll buy a bit today for his business, Master Handyman Inc., and what his clients don’t need, he’ll salt away in storage until someone needs it — maybe when Las Vegas gets better, which Ledbetter believes it will, someday. In the meantime, there are always people who need help fixing up the foreclosed home they bought and there are still even some people who just don’t like their front door and he’ll be hired to install a new one.

Ledbetter puts the hinge down and looks around the workshop at the unused supplies, the half-finished doors, the idle tools and the job board wiped clean. “Shame to see another business go down in Vegas,” he says.

This is how a dead business decomposes, with an army of insects carrying it off a mouthful at a time. An auction.

It’s 9:30 on a Tuesday morning in the industrial district west of the Strip, across Interstate 15. While Ledbetter is examining the back workshop of a door manufacturer, Dave McCormack is in the front showroom, running his mouth like a scalded greyhound as he sells off display boards of doorknobs, one side only. Pick of the lot, high bid gets pick of the lot, make the high bid and pick one of these five fine display boards. Can he get $25, $25 for the pick, $25, no? no? no $25? How about $15, then ...

And so on.

His wife, Kris, is holding a long pole, pointing at and calling out bidders. Soon, they’ve exhausted the doorknobs and are into the office equipment and computers, one of them beige with a sticker that says “Designed for Windows 95.” Chairs. Fax machines. Book cases. And then it’s off through the finished doors. Just getting though the small showroom takes hours. And then there’s the giant workshop and, out back, a few vans and trucks, big Fords that will go for more than $12,000.

The auction lasts into the mid-afternoon, far less time than the McCormacks spent organizing the inventory, numbering it and marketing the auction online and with fliers.

The buyers are almost all men, about 80 of them, with knives clipped to their pockets and tape measures on their hips, contractors and do-it-yourselfers. The workshop is what they are most interested in.

McCormack leads the buyers over to a table of door handles still in their boxes.

“We just took them off the shelf and put them there, they’re all there, that’s what there is, if there’s parts missing, if the parts are all there, well, God bless you. The whole table and you get to keep the table. Now let’s get started here ...”