Finding great deals on furniture

We love modern/Scandinavian design and thank goodness someone told us about the Room and Board Outlet when we moved into our house a few years ago. Many a weekend has included a trip. The outlet is only open on Saturdays and Sundays. People arrive up to an hour before it opens and line up around the building. We did that once, but have found that it's better to go about an hour or two after it opens, that way the crowds have thinned out and you don't have the herd/scarcity mentality that can cause you to buy just because so many other people are there and buying.

Photo from http://www.roomandboard.com/

Looking at our living room/kitchen area, it's amazing how much has come from the outlet. Our kitchen table top and base, kitchen chairs, dining room hutch, and sofa were all purchased from there. Of course, it probably took a total of over 15 visits to find and buy everything. You never know what will be there, as new items are unpacked throughout the weekend. Most of the time you walk out with empty hands, and that's OK. We bought the tabletop a couple months before the table base we wanted showed up. The kitchen chairs were bought one or two at a time, and we saved over 50% on each. Our best find so far was a Linear Cabinet (similar to the one linked), it would have retailed for over $3,000 and we got it for under $1,000.

Craigslist is another thrifty source for furniture. If there is a certain brand or piece of furniture you are looking for, you can set up an RSS feed search to email you every time one is posted. That's how we found a Room and Board armchair a few years ago which was a perfect match with our other decor.

The Wall Street Journal published an article about finding good deals on designer furniture today, which inspired me to write this post: Never Pay Retail Decorating: A Bargain Huntress Reveals her Secrets. The article covers other ways to find thrifty, but well-designed furniture.

Thrifty Strategy- Frame art yourself

As I've mentioned before, my husband has become quite good at framing posters and photos. Most of the art in our house has been framed by him, and he has also done some framing for other people. The project you see below is a wedding picture of his sister and her husband. My husband framed it for them as a gift.

There is an initial investment in a mat cutter, saw, biscuit joiner, point gun, etc, but it has more than re-paid itself. The cost to get a piece of art this size framed at Michael's or another store is easily over $200.



1. Gluing two pieces of molding together to create the desired frame thickness




2. Cutting the long pieces into the individual sides of the frame











3. Side view of the molding after being cut






4. Using biscuit joining tool to cut slots in each side



5. See how the biscuit fits into the two pieces

6. After the two sides are glued together, sanding edges smooth

7. Staining the completed frame

8. The mat cutter

9. Measuring the width of the mat

10. Cutting the mat

11. Putting it together

12. Attaching the backer (foamcore) with point gun

13. Rolling brown paper over the back and taping in place

14. Attaching the hardware to hang the frame

And the final product- A double-matted (orange inside, cream outside) custom-framed piece of art! He usually uses plexiglass instead of glass, but for this one ended up using glass.

Thrifty Strategy- Post-Holiday Shopping

I hit up my local Target today for some 90% off Halloween items. Yes, that's right, 90%. Whatever is left will probably be gone tomorrow to make room for even more Christmas stuff. Here are the deals I got:

- A hooded sweatshirt for my daughter with a cat on it and cat ears on the hood. $9.99 marked down to $0.99
- Two picture frames. $4.99 each marked down to $0.49 each
- 2 plastic kids' cups with floating glitter and spooky shapes in the sides. $1.99 each marked down to $0.19 each
- A package of 24 foil muffin tin liners in the shape of ghosts. $2.49 marked down to $0.24

That makes a grand total of $2.59 spent for all of the above.

We have used this strategy for most of our Christmas, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Easter, etc home decorations. We buy when the discount hits 75% off or so and save for next year. The key is to put it away in the right, labeled, storage tote so we remember it the next year.

Have you ever tried this strategy?

Thrifty Website- art.com

When we were decorating our first house, my husband stumbled upon the website art.com. It is a great place to find the perfect artwork for any room. You can search and filter on a ton of categories and most of the pieces are available in multiple sizes. Once you create an account you can build "galleries" to save your favorite pieces in as you're exploring the site and trying to decide what to buy.

There always seems to be some kind of sale or deal going on. We receive email coupons from them every month it seems. When you combine that with the fact that we have a mat cutter and my husband makes the mats and frames for the artwork (post coming in the future about that), we save a TON of money. Most of the time we buy the art and then pick the paint color for the room afterwards. It's easier to match paint to art that you already have, you can bring the art right to the hardware store to pick the perfect color!

Want examples of what we have purchased? See below for some pictures.

This is one of the two pieces that started it all. We bought it along with a similar one of Cabernet Sauvignon for a bedroom in our first house, it's moved with us twice and is in a bedroom in our current house. We used identical mat and frame colors for both prints.

This is one of five prints we purchased for our upstairs hallway. It's a series of line drawings of animals by Picasso. We used a different color mat for each print but identical frames.

We purchased three Asian-inspired prints with similar colors and used them in our hall bathroom. Each print has a different mat color but the same frame color and thickness.

When we lived in California, this along with two other fish designs by the same artist were the color inspiration for our guest bathroom. Now they're in a bedroom. Each piece has the same color frame but different mat colors.