Decoration: 5 Tips To Furnish Yourself Cheaply
When moving into a new home, buying furniture is one of the biggest expenses. While the prices of new furniture continue to soar due to inflation, a third of French people say they are tempted by second-hand furniture. If this is your case, we give you 5 tips to furnish yourself cheaply.
1- Flea markets and yard sales
The first trick to furnish yourself cheap is to go to flea markets or yard sales. At these events, furniture and other home accessories are sold at low prices.
The prices displayed are much more affordable than in stores (around €20 for a vintage dresser, for example) and it is always possible to negotiate the price with the sellers, especially if you buy several items from them.
2- Used items in stores or online
With the rise in new prices and the decline in the purchasing power of the French, more and more websites are specializing in second hand items.
The second good plan to know to furnish yourself cheaply is to consult websites specialized in second-hand furniture like Izidore (see link below).
The French craze for second hand is such that even the biggest brands are getting into it. This is notably the case of the giant Ikea, which has launched a platform called Ikea Seconde Vie.
The brand's customers can buy or sell used Ikea products there. All they have to do is reserve the item online and pick it up at the store of their choice.
3 - Clearance stores
The third solution to furnish yourself cheaply is to go to a clearance store.
Clearance stores offer unsold items, end-of-series, old collections or products from major brands sold at a discounted price due to liquidation. This is a good plan to know if you want to buy fashionable furniture cheap.
These physical stores are a bit the equivalent of online sales and clearance sales, but with the added advantage of being able to see the furniture 'for real' and measure it before you buy it...
4- Stooping
As incredible as it sounds, you can also find brand new furniture on the sidewalk. On Instagram some pages reference the best finds of passersby under the hashtag #stooping.
Stooping is a very trendy phenomenon in Italy and the United States and is starting to develop in France. Real communities of Internet users are forming around this hashtag in cities around the world, for example in Montreal :
Internet users go on a treasure hunt in the streets and share their findings on social networks because one person's clutter often makes another person's happiness. As the stooping Americans say: Someone's trash is somebody else's treasure ;-)
5- Online donations
Finally, the last way to furnish yourself cheaply is to take advantage of free furniture, donated by internet users on the Geev website or app or on the donnons.org website which boasts of having saved more than 3 million items from the trash!
It is also possible to get free furniture by participating in support groups on Facebook.
You will have understood, to take advantage of this bargain and give a second life to furniture that others no longer want, you just need to prospect regularly on the Internet. Happy free online shopping!
