I was able to purchase my home at a very young age. But after I signed on the dotted line, I realized that there was still a lot of work ahead of me. I was gracious enough to have the bedroom suit that my parents used in their home but I still needed furniture for the other rooms of the house.
If you were like me, you spent a lot of money on the down payment of the home that you forget to think about blinds, couches, tables, chairs and dressers. So I’m going to give you a list of things you can try that will help you furnish your home or apartment for cheap.
Make a List
The first thing you need to do is make a list. This will allow you to get your thoughts down on paper as well as see how much furniture you really need. When you create this list, rank the items on it based on priority, for example. You would need a bed before you need a dining room table, you may need curtains before you need shelves in the garage.
Once you have the items listed from highest to lowest priority start chipping away at the list the best that you can. It may take some time to get everything on this list but you will have the more important things first and the fancy things later, which leads me to my next point
Marathon Not a Sprint
You want to make sure that you aren’t trying to get everything all in one day. You can do this but you’re not going to save a lot of money by doing it. So take a reality check and let yourself know that it may take you a few weeks to months to maybe even a year to acquire everything that you want for your home or apartment.
This is a marathon not a sprint and in order to catch all the deals that come year round or to find the right centerpiece be prepared to take some time to look.
Annual Sales
You may or may not notice that on TV around July 4th there are numerous commercials about furniture stores’ Independence Day sales, if you’re in the US. Some of these sales could be the best that you will see all year round whether it’s on July 4th or any other holiday.
So if you’re looking for some new furniture and you have time to wait, check out when the next holiday is and be prepared to make a purchase. Furniture stores like clothing stores turnover inventory every so often and they need to get rid of things to have space for the income items that they have.
Thrift or Take Hand Me Downs
This last suggestion is kind of different if you’re not used to it. You can also check out a thrift store to see what kind of furniture they have in stock. A lot of times people will throw away or give away furniture that they don’t need anymore and you can find a diamond in the rough with these kinds of items.
On the flip side of that you can also ask your friend group or family to see if somebody’s getting rid of a bedroom suit, a couch, a table, or whatever it might be. They will give you these items for free if you just simply pick them up so if you want to save a couple dollars make sure you ask around.
Rob’s Opinion
What I did to furnish my home was a little out of the ordinary. I didn’t have a job and it was still in the height of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. So what I did was find a reputable wholesaler in the city that I was moving to. And in doing that I saw who they were wholesaling for. For me the company wholesale for Ashley.
So I simply went on Ashley’s website and found the items that I wanted, and went back to the wholesaler to see how much they would charge for those particular items. Oftentimes the price that they would give me was thousands of dollars cheaper than what Ashley was charging for the same item.
I said all this to say, make sure you don’t count any idea out when doing this search. Because you never know, you might find exactly what you’re looking for in the most uncommon place.
