In the early 90's, my Bride considered the pile of computers around my desk. "Why not just get one big one?" Fast forward a couple weeks where I was shopping at the Lockheed outlet store - and found a Sun 3/280s and 19" wide, 8' tall rack for $25. She was not amused to have a 'big one' the size of a fridge in our tiny apartment.
That old server has gone through many, many incarnations of hardware.
My wife came into our relationship with not just one, not just two, but THREE NeXTcubes. I negotiated her down to one actually-working one and one decorative one, and gave away the third.
I had a proliant 7000 (quad pentium II xeon) for a while, it was 16U and as loud as three vacuum cleaners. The spouse was very happy when that disappeared.
About 20 years ago I moved into a tiny studio with my first serious girlfriend. She didn't appreciate the beautiful sounds of my 1980's IBM Model M keyboard I'd been using since I was 5. Probably more so since I usually worked late into the night. Given another gripe was the significant amount of floor/deskspace used by my two 19" CRT monitors, I compromised, and replaced the Model M with some $20 logitech thing, throwing the M out in the trash.
Boeing does a lot of surplusing through EHLI Auctions [1] these days. Prices aren't always great, and I'm not sure I've seen machine tooling or huge wrenches, but big batches of office and workshop stuff marked boeing surplus from time to time.
Similarly, GE does it through Link Warehouse (https://www.linkwarehouse.com/), but it is geared towards industrial equipment. I haven't noticed any office stuff.
Man I will say it ! Before Apple made beautiful computers... Sun made very pretty machines (for that era !) I always wanted one of those purple beasts :D
That old server has gone through many, many incarnations of hardware.