Think of it as your chance to own a piece of history. The US embassy in London – a Grade II-listed modernist building, site of a Vietnam war demonstration, visited by generations of US presidents – is holding an online auction of “surplus property” and you only have until Wednesday next week to bid for rare finds such as a pallet of toilet rolls, some broken vacuum cleaners and a scuffed coffee table.

It is a curious jumble of items: desk lamps, a Volvo S80, boring bookcases, a circular saw, 22 plastic stacking chairs, five broken Dyson vacuum cleaners and a defective photocopier (price: £1; condition: scrap). Most useful, perhaps, is the pallet of 1,200 loo rolls, which, at the time of writing, had no bids from its £100 starting price. Why such a surplus? Do they ration them?

A circular saw is also up for grabs. Photograph: US embassy auction site

These aren’t even the weirdest things being sold by US missions. There are auctions happening, or about to happen, in other countries with a similar car boot sale-style load of tat. Yerevan, Armenia, has several rugs “with stains”, office chairs (also “with stains”) and a broken fridge among its 45 lots. The embassy in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev, offers several household appliances and a load of printer-ink cartridges, as well as computers and mobile phones “with cracks and scratches”.

The auction in Ankara, Turkey, has helpfully split its lots into furniture collections, so you could kit out your flat with a ready-made curated collection comprising beige armchair, office chair, lamp and end table. Tirana, Albania, wants to offload a few generators; Lisbon’s lots seem mostly to include office furniture, but without pictures – so there is no detail as to what a “thermocummer” (price: €10, or £8.90) is. Stockholm’s catalogue is grander, with a lot of dark wood ornate furniture, chandeliers – and a step machine. Three of Belgrade’s five lots are unused eight-foot ladders.

A ‘usable’ Volvo is up for auction by the US embassy in London. Photograph: US embassy auction site

Why don’t they take the stuff to the charity shop, or stick it on Freecycle like a normal person would? Because the US Foreign Affairs Manual states that if property based abroad is not returned to the country it “may be sold if in the best interest of the US government”, with proceeds going to the Treasury. Every cent counts. It’s not the world’s foremost capitalist cheerleader for nothing.