When I was a kid, my favorite books were a series of mystery novels, featuring Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.  The three investigators were teenagers who went around solving mysteries.  The brain of the trio was Jupiter Jones, who was lucky enough to live in a salvage yard, surrounded by acres and acres of cool stuff.  The boys made money for their detective business by repairing and renovating the junk that was sold or given to the salvage yard.  I thought that that was a cool thing to do, and I’ve been a fan of visiting salvage yards (to give them a more dignified name) ever since.

When it comes time to refurbishing your apartment, or furnishing a new home, why spend thousands of dollars on new furniture when you can spend much less money, and save a few trees, by going to a salvage yard and choosing what you need?

Oh, the furniture may be more than a little beat up, but chances are that you can repair it with a few tools, and if you’ve got any talent in the arena at all, you could probably even make the item look better than the original!  If you don’t have the skills necessary to do your own refurbishing, you can do one of two things.  Take lessons at your local Vo-Tech, or check out a few books from the library to do a little home studying or hire a local handyman – or woman, to help you out.  Their fees will still be less than if you had bought the item new.

Other places to find used furniture, if you don’t fancy walking around a salvage yard, is to check online sites such as Craigslist, or use sites such as Furnitrader that allow you to deal locally.

Of course, being on a budget is not the only reason to buy used furniture.  It can be as simple a case as wanting to save a bunch of perfectly usable furniture from going to a landfill.