Furnish your home for £1000

by Serena Cowdy on 23 October 2007  |  3 comments
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Here's how you can furnish your home from top to bottom - for £1000.

Three months ago, I was in a tricky position. Actually, I was in a bit of a panic. My partner and I had just rented our first, totally unfurnished flat and we had very little money.

Sitting on the floor, surrounded by heaps of cardboard boxes, we worked out we could afford to spend £1000 (between us) kitting the place out. With that £1000, we needed to furnish every room in our one-bedroom (+ study) flat, as well as getting hold of all the kitchen and bathroom ware and quite a few electrical appliances.

I ran around panicking a bit more as I thought of the typical cost of a bed and mattress alone. We were clearly faced with the prospect of sleeping on the floor, sitting on boxes and having carpet picnics for months until we saved up enough to sort the place out.

Anyway, just twelve weeks on, we are the gleeful residents of a cosy, completely furnished flat. And we stuck to our budget -- just.

First I should mention that we were lucky in the following ways:

• The flat did come with white goods (fridge, freezer and washing machine) carpets and curtains. This obviously saved us lots of cash, and many bewildering hours in the John Lewis fabric department.
• We had time on our side. We didn't need to get everything sorted in the first week, and could afford to wait a couple of months for the right bargain to pop up. Obviously, this isn't the case for everyone.
• We didn't mind doing a bit of (albeit disastrous) DIY.

Where to look

Freegle

This online recycling network is fantastic and provided about half the furniture we needed.

Freegle communities can now be found all over the UK, and across the globe. They encourage the re-use of goods by giving them away for free, rather than chucking them out.

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I joined my local group and within a month had been given a beautiful 1930s chest of drawers, an Edwardian sideboard, a lovely little antique coffee table and a large pine kitchen dresser (also antique).

The only downside is that you usually have to collect the goods yourself. We don't have a car, so this meant spending £50, overall, in van and taxi hire to get the stuff home. 

This online community started in London as a local classified ads and community site, and covers most of the UK and many cities overseas.

It is a great place to find cheap household goods (as well as almost everything else, from cars to jobs). There's even a ‘freebies' section, where you can get something for nothing.

We bought our 1930s double wardrobe on Gumtree for £25 (which included the very nice chap delivering it).

As with Freecycle, you may have to pay for transport to pick the stuff up if you don't have your own.

Industrial outlets

We saved lots of money on our bed, kitchen table and chairs by visiting a rather out-of-the-way pine furniture industrial outlet we found online. The furniture here turned out to be much cheaper than its high street equivalent and there was a whole warehouse to choose from.

We got our solid wood, king-size bed for £40 because it was ex-display. We also got a new pine kitchen table and four chairs for £125. The most expensive purchase was, predictably, the mattress - which took a £160 bite out of our budget.

This sort of furniture is solid wood and sturdy - but you do have to pay a delivery charge (£25 in our case) and it comes flat packed. This means you need to be able to dedicate a couple of hours to putting it together (Well, it took us a day, but we did start off putting the bed together back to front).

It's also worth checking you can visit an outlet which specialises in online sales - occasionally there is no public access to the factory itself.

These little shops can be found almost anywhere in the UK. At the one near us we found a huge oak table with four carved chairs, and haggled the set down to £120 including delivery.

Many people seem to want to furnish their homes in a modern style, so if you're happy with the older, solid wood approach you can pick up some lovely pieces very cheaply. I'm convinced the table is an Arts and Crafts antique, while my boyfriend thinks it's from the pub down the road - but either way that's the study sorted out.

Perhaps best-known for clothing bargains, these are also great for cheap household goods and furniture. In keeping with the old-school look I was going for, I picked up a wooden shelving unit for the kitchen (£3), a copper bucket (£2) and a brass jug (£2).

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High street bargains

If you don't mind hitting the less fashionable end of town, you can save lots of cash by rooting around in some old high street favourites:

Argos - We wanted a new sofa rather than a secondhand one, but obviously our means didn't match our aspirations. The living room space we had left was also rather tiny. The solution came in the form of a small sofa from Argos. It's very comfy and it also turns into a bed (handy as we don't have a spare bedroom). It set us back just £188, and for that price I won't be grumbling if it collapses in a few years time.

Argos - two huge bookshelves for £30 each - a complete storage solution for £60 if you're prepared to crawl around on the floor for a while wondering where all those screws are meant to go.

Argos - Two big shiny chrome bins, a matching toaster, a wood/linen laundry basket, a wooden shoe rack and a duck board - totalling just over £75.

Homebase - A white china crockery set for four people = £20

Homebase - A stainless steel cutlery set (also for four) = £10

Homebase - A four-piece stainless steel pan set = £13

Woolworths - All sorts of cheap household stuff, including a chopping board, two baking trays, four wine glasses, four mugs, a pyrex jug and dish, a mop and bucket, cleaning cloths, clothes pegs, a toilet roll holder and a cutlery drainer. Yes, Woolworths may have shut down on the high street, but it's still operating online! Good alternatives include Poundland, the 99p Store, and Wilkinsons.

Of course, there were some things we could have spent less on. We ended up paying £32 for a rather strange ruby-red hob kettle I fell in love with, and we probably didn't actually NEED the copper bucket. But luckily, we still managed to stick to our budget, because we'd saved so much on the big stuff.

Sideboard - free

Coffee table - free

Van/taxi hire - £50

Double wardrobe - £25

Pine king-size bed - £40

Pine kitchen table and four chairs - £125

King-size mattress - £160

Oak table and four chairs - £120

Two bookshelves - £60

All other items - £209

Obviously, this is just one example of how it could be done. It does take a bit of time and quite a lot of running about. I'll never forget the look on my partner's face when he realised we've have to carry the oak sideboard down four flights of stairs at one end and then up another two.

However - it all seems to have come together, and we've got a nice clear credit card!

This is a classic article which was updated in May 2010.

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