Hello from the bay area!

My wife and I do all the work ourselves. I sand and repair while she does the painting/staining and listing. For storage we have two 10×12 buildings in the back yard which is the maximum the city allows. We are pretty selective on which pieces are worth the time and effort to restore or upcycle. A lot of our business is just effort of being early to yard/garage/estate sales or jumping on Craigslist ads first. Don’t know how many maple dressers I have seen sell for $30. Way under priced so we just flip things like that.

So our rough rule of thumb is if we can’t make double it isn’t worth out time. Our bread and butter is just basic flipping of solid wood dressers. The popular ones here being french provincial and mid-century modern designs. Never pay more than $50 for a solid wood dresser and those are the brands people desire like drexel is very popular here. We organize our sales into 2 categories quick flips where we want to make at least double and free up space and then the ones we work on we want to make approx. 5 times our investment. We try to limit our time on a piece to 5 hours as a maximum. We source 90% of our materials from Craigslist, apps, or garage/estate sales. The only thing I think we find ourselves buying at hardware stores are sanding discs and tack cloths. I will work on the best way to show off some of our recent work on here briefly.

So our rough rule of thumb is if we can’t make double it isn’t worth out time. Our bread and butter is just basic flipping of solid wood dressers. The popular ones here being french provincial and mid-century modern designs. Never pay more than $50 for a solid wood dresser and those are the brands people desire like drexel is very popular here. We organize our sales into 2 categories quick flips where we want to make at least double and free up space and then the ones we work on we want to make approx. 5 times our investment. We try to limit our time on a piece to 5 hours as a maximum. We source 90% of our materials from Craigslist, apps, or garage/estate sales. The only thing I think we find ourselves buying at hardware stores are sanding discs and tack cloths. I will work on the best way to show off some of our recent work on here briefly.

Sorry for the double post. I threw together a pintrest page of some of our work I still have pics of on my phone. I thought you’d like this Board on Pinterest… https://pin.it/egPba5X

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Jollz. Reason: Missing link
• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Jollz.

We definitely don’t do it as a full time job but more as a second income stream. I know making $50 profit on a dresser isn’t a huge margin ,but that is our bare minimum profit. On the ones like the pintrest piece we make about $200 profit on average. The amount of furniture we move surprises me sometimes. Hopefully we will be adding to our sales with other things we find at thrifts/garage sales and the like. We just sold out first piece of clothing (anything really) on ebay. An English Laundry embroidered shirt for $15 that we paid a dollar for. Diversity and making your money going in like they say is key.

Most of our sale are through offerup, 5 miles, and similar apps. We are just beginning our ebay journey so I will definitely do some research on furniture sales on the site. Thanks for the advice.