Remembering resell value when comparing new and used furniture

[Oslo_gal]

When moving into our Oslo apartment 18 months ago, we knew that it was temporary and did not want to spend a ton of money on furniture. A lot of my stuff is old stuff that's been in my family for ages, but I also spent quite a lot of time online looking for good deals on the Norwegian equivalent of Craigslist. We even brought home some furniture we found left on the streets :) At the time I was very proud of how little we spent and how good it all looked (I even calculated how much we spent on the whole apartment and compared notes with friends and family - I must have been soooo annoying!).

BUT. Now that we are moving I am so pleasantly surprised at the kind of money I am getting when reselling this stuff! I decided to post it online early and at a steep price, and spent some extra effort on the pictures and description - and it really paid off! We got our bed for free, and sold it for $120, our kitchen table was a street-find that I sold for $60, and other finds have almost all sold at a higher price than I paid for it. We'll keep some things, and I've sold some things that I've owned for ages, so I can't really do a side-by-side comparison of how much we spent and how much we got back. But it does look like I'll be close to breaking even, which means that we got to "rent" our ideal furnitures pretty much for free.

I'm sure this isn't all that revolutionary to the folks in here, but I write it because I had kind of neglected thinking about resell value when furnishing this place. We tried to avoid buying cheap stuff at IKEA out of idealism, but we did buy some used IKEA-stuff (this is Scandinavia..). Our thoughts were that we'd rather buy the pricier IKEA-stuff used, than to buy the cheapest stuff new for the same price and contribute to the buy-and-throw mentality. It makes sense that used stuff just don't deprecate at the same rate as brand new stuff, not even when it comes to appliances.

It's funny, because I'd never want to resell stuff on craigslist as a side hustle, but in effect I guess that's just what I ended up doing :) I'll definitely try to keep the resell value in mind when furnishing our next place, even though I hope to stay there a bit longer than 18 months.

[andreamac]

Great tip! I did this once by buying a used real wood table and then when we sold our house we sold it to someone else for the same price. So free table for about 5 years, so not bad. Only thing is I still miss that table!

[gardenarian]

Excellent advice.
And it's not only the money you might get back on the furniture, it's being able to get rid of your furniture at all. What do you do with a big broken bookshelf made of particle board? Pretty hard to dispose of.  Get quality used furniture and it will find another home. The U.S. has reached Peak Stuff and you can hardly give things away.

[Tjat]

I've shared this opinion elsewhere on this board, but to add on, I think the way the furniture market has been flooded with cheap crap disguised as "high quality" is disgusting. I have no problem with the self-assemble stuff that Ikea, Target, etc sell because with those you know exactly what you're getting and receive expected quality for your dollar.

However, the major furniture retailers that put a staple a bunch of glued together sawdust boards ("furniture" boards - renamed beacuse people caught on to particleboard) and then slap a pretty microscopically thin laminate on it and then mark it up 500% and tell customers it's high quality are disgusting. What's worse is that this drives up high quality USA made all-wood furniture to crazy price levels. Which in turn, drives up the used market.

At least with wood furniture an average person can learn what equals quality with just cursory research. The worst I've seen is mattresses, where major retailers pile a bunch of cheap low quality foams on top of an innerspring, mark it up 3000%, and then market all the mattress weaknesses as a benefit.

/rant finished


Back OT, well done on your furniture trading. Great deal at point of purchase but to spin it for a profit is even better!

[Oslo_gal]

I've shared this opinion elsewhere on this board, but to add on, I think the way the furniture market has been flooded with cheap crap disguised as "high quality" is disgusting. I have no problem with the self-assemble stuff that Ikea, Target, etc sell because with those you know exactly what you're getting and receive expected quality for your dollar.

However, the major furniture retailers that put a staple a bunch of glued together sawdust boards ("furniture" boards - renamed beacuse people caught on to particleboard) and then slap a pretty microscopically thin laminate on it and then mark it up 500% and tell customers it's high quality are disgusting. What's worse is that this drives up high quality USA made all-wood furniture to crazy price levels. Which in turn, drives up the used market.

At least with wood furniture an average person can learn what equals quality with just cursory research. The worst I've seen is mattresses, where major retailers pile a bunch of cheap low quality foams on top of an innerspring, mark it up 3000%, and then market all the mattress weaknesses as a benefit.

/rant finished


Back OT, well done on your furniture trading. Great deal at point of purchase but to spin it for a profit is even better!

Another good reason for buying used furniture! :)

Even though we did get some stuff from IKEA like I said, we also have some proper all-wood old pieces who seemed the most popular.  And it makes sense! Old, all-wood furniture has already proven itself to stand the test of time. If some paint is chipped off from my dense all-wood writing desk, you can just repaint it. But if the same thing happens to particle board, it kinda signals the start of the end for that piece. Then again, the most profitable pieces seem to be 60s scandivian in teak, and it seems they can be wobbly and stained and it doesn't matter (style might be just as much of a selling point as quality for some).

The mattress thing has been a concern of mine for some time, as I've tried to research it without really finding what I look for. I really want to buy a good mattress that will last us for ever, and at a reasonalbe price point. There seems to be a jungle of manufacturers and stores, and I don't trust all the reviews that I see online, and the mattresses in the US seem slightly different from the ones I've had in Norway (I've always just had a simple mattress, and then bought a (higher quality) top mattress seperately)

[Kitsune]

I will second (third? fourth?) that experience!

Also, if you're intending to stick around the same house for a long time, it's still worth it - I see so many of my colleagues 're-decorating' by throwing out everything (or trying to sell it on Kijiji for a low price) and then buying new, it's an astounding amount of money spent on aesthetics (and no one wants 7-year-old particleboard desks and 1990s-style single beds, so good luck offloading those). If you're decorating (with a good eye, obv) with good-quality used pieces, 're-decorating' means shifting items in and out as they're available used, but not spending more $.

We've even done that with thrift-store art - bought a painting we liked for 60$, hung it for 3 years, got sick of it, and sold it to someone who ADORED it for 100.

[FrugalFan]

This is something I've been noticing lately and it applies to baby stuff as well. If you buy it new, you can definitely resell it but usually at a huge markdown. If you buy it used, you can usually sell it for the same price you paid. I wish I had realized this a bit earlier.

[Kitsune]

To build on my previous comment: this is also a place where a little bit of DIY knowledge carries you a LONG way.

Re-wiring a lamp (honestly, it sounds way harder than it is): a half-hour plus 10$ in parts. But a gorgeous large brass lamp from the thrift store is 20$ - 30$+a half hour of work, and you've got something that you'd pay 150+ for new, and that you can sell for over 100$, in most cases.

Similar math applies to things like minor fixes on high-quality wood furniture (more time involved if you're stripping off paint, obv, but occasionally worth doing).

And frankly: furniture made in the 1940s and 50s was made more solid than what's sold as high-quality now. It's worth re-finishing that instead of buying Ikea, it'll last longer, and it'll be worth more if you get sick of it or move or need something different.

[Cassie]

When we were in our 20's we bought good quality antiques and refinished them. 40 years later they are still beautiful.