For Furniture Flippers, Posting Is Where the Money’s At

Kara Ward became a furniture flipper almost by accident, as she recounts often on her channel, Lemons To Lemonade Home‬. Her husband, like so many others, lost his job in 2020, and the family was $60,000 in debt. They panicked about what they were going to do. So to distract themselves, they started watching furniture refinishing videos by Christina Muscari on YouTube.

That weekend, they ended up painting their own bedroom furniture, and Ward posted the results on Facebook to show off to their friends and family. Immediately, some of them popped into her inbox asking if she could do their furniture too. With the caveat that they didn’t know what they were doing, the pair took on projects from anyone willing to drop them off.

As the husband-and-wife team’s skill set improved, they started charging anywhere from $800 to $1,200 for a dresser. They worked full-time, completing six to seven pieces a week, some custom orders and others items off the curb or from Facebook Marketplace. They’d struck at the right moment, when people were stuck at home and redecorating, and nothing was going to ship to them on time.

Fast forward a year and two months, and they had paid off all their debt, which Ward posted about on Instagram. The post gained some traction, and she was invited to tell her story on financial adviser Dave Ramsey’s YouTube show. During her furniture flipping journey, she’d started documenting herself on YouTube, and after that appearance, her channel took off and became another income stream. So when her husband got another job, she was able to keep generating income with fewer flips while growing her social media presence.

Her channel, like any, is headlined for clicks: “How I Made $60 Thrift Dresser to $1000 Profit! Why This Dresser Flip Will Shock You!” and “I Made $3000 with THIS ONE Simple DIY Furniture Trick!” She offers advice on how others can get into furniture flipping as a side hustle. And she’s not the only one. There are dozens of furniture influencers sharing how they grew a steady flow of cash from turning trash into treasure.

I started watching Ward and other YouTubers when I started refinishing furniture about a year ago as a hobby. I kept wondering, would anybody really want the old junk I’d fixed up? Were people like Ward an anomaly? Was it really possible to make money at this? 

“It’s possible,” Ward assured me when I talked to her. “It seems to have legs for other people too. There’s a lot of trial and error, and it will take you some time to find a groove, even if you’re crafty and creative. But it’s possible.”

Ward admits she had a lot going for her. Not only did she enter the fray at the right time, but Dallas, where she lives, is a booming real estate market. She found a niche in recreating dupes of brands such as Pottery Barn and Anthropologie, which sell well when she posts them for 75 percent of the typical price. She mentors others, who’ve had some financial success too, especially if they’re also located in hot spots. Her best tip for newbies: “If you want it to sell quickly and for top dollar, you better be recreating pieces that people want.”

There are some items that always sell well, she says, particularly dressers, which can have multiple uses, and nightstands. Coffee tables don’t tend to do as well, though they’re great to practice on because you can usually buy them for cheap. You can figure out, based on previous sales on Facebook Marketplace, what sells at a high price in your area and market your own work accordingly.

But the pace she was working at originally was unsustainable in the long-term, she admits, so flipping furniture wasn’t a business strategy that could work forever. It’s hard on the body, especially in her hot Texas garage. Though she continues to post videos about the profits she makes flipping furniture, in reality, flipping furniture isn’t the primary source of her income anymore. Not everyone is as transparent about that. “YouTube, sponsorship deals, that’s how I make my money now,” she told me. “That’s eighty percent of my income, whereas flipping furniture is twenty percent of my income. So it’s completely flipped once social media took off.”

Furniture flipping is still a primary income source for fellow flipper Jennifer Beck, even though she also has a large following on Instagram, under the handle SavedbyDesign.tn. When she and her mother both decided to quit their draining nine-to-five jobs, they got into refinishing pieces with chalk paint and the first few modest sales led to inquiries about custom work. The requests kept coming, and soon, it wasn’t uncommon for them to do 16 or more pieces a month.

That steady income eventually allowed her to invest in nicer pieces that could be simply refreshed and didn’t need a complete restoration. What furniture flippers don’t talk about enough, she said, is how much of the work is not about completely refashioning a piece but simply finding quality items that needed to be marketed the right way, with some good cleaning, staging and photography.

Starting out, it can be useful to buy cheap furniture in bad shape to figure out how to use a sander and a paint sprayer and develop other skills. But to make money flipping furniture, you can’t spend that long on a piece. Today, because Beck and her mother have  gotten to understand their market and developed a brand, they can sell their pieces for about $2,000 to $3,000 each. They do five or six a month. “You have to keep track of what went fast, what took longer,” Beck says. “Was it restored or painted? From a certain era?”

Another piece of advice is that it’s important to offer delivery. Though the pair used to do all the grunt work by themselves, they now have an employee who takes care of pickups and deliveries. If you’re not in a major city where a lot of people are buying furniture, Beck suggests going on Etsy and offering shipping to reach a bigger audience. She started off on Instagram to build a portfolio of her work to reach more buyers, and  was shocked when her audience grew to hundreds of thousands, and she started getting checks from Instagram. Though she never intended to transition, because of the grueling nature of refinishing work, she sees herself eventually moving into content too. “I have literally bought pieces because I’m like, ‘That’s going to make a really good transformation,’ whether it’s going from paint to being restored or whether it’s a piece that’s really rough that I know is not a stain grade piece, but a lot of people get really committed to thinking that it needs to be restored to wood. That’s going to be a very controversial reel, and that increases views,” Beck says.

I got a more cautionary take about the potential to make money furniture flipping from Christina Muscari, whose YouTube channel Pretty Distressed, inspired Ward’s own trajectory. In her area in Tennessee, she’s found there’s simply not a market for used pieces. In the past, she lived in places where there was, but YouTube was still by far more profitable and was always her primary source of income.

Additionally, the kinds of projects that influencers do on their channels are often very different from what can turn a profit. Those videos of flippers spending hours adding trim or decals are for views. Furniture that makes money rarely involves that much creativity. Muscari says that while some furniture flippers have had financial success, they are rare, and others are likely stretching the truth about their profits. “I mean, you can make money,” she said. “Anybody who’s selling the idea that you can make so much money just flipping junk, I would just be wary of it because you have to do so much of it. There are people who can garner $1,000 or $2,000, but they’ve got to be very good at it.”

One of the things the influencers kept telling me was that many of their followers don’t ever intend to use their tutorials. They watch the videos late at night when they’re falling asleep or enjoying their morning coffee. It makes them feel like they’re chitchatting with a friend in their garage. They might look at the furniture they inherited from their grandmother and start to see it differently. Or maybe they’ll fantasize about leaving their boring desk jobs and doing something with their hands.

What got me was the need for time away from my computer and a furniture flipping friend who offered up his workspace so I could get started. He also attempted to get me my first sale. I’d been struggling with a set of nightstands he was helping me refinish at his house. They had great bones, but the varnish was so thick that an orbital sander couldn’t get it in good enough shape to paint, so he’d had me use his belt sander. I’d created a huge dent in the top. No amount of Bondo, a solution for repairing dings and scratches on cars, was fixing it.

I let the furniture sit for a while. Eventually, because he was moving, he tried to get rid of them for me for $25 on Facebook Marketplace. While people messaged about them, they ultimately flaked. Finally, someone came and got them for free. The piece ended up putting me in the hole by about $50. These kinds of inevitable failures are what the furniture influencers don’t always show. Any piece can go bad quickly.

A few months after my nightstand fail, I finally had the mental energy to tackle a couple more pieces. I had a better clue now about what kind of furniture was even worth the effort. I scored a free Kling Furniture Co. nightstand and found another one with an almost identical form not too far from me for $25 on Facebook Marketplace. They were in bad shape and were different colors, but my plan was to make them a set for my daughter’s princess-y room.

I have to emphasize how unusual this find was. I’d been looking for a set that was the right size for months. A nice, matching solid wood set for a good price isn’t that common, so to score one and then find its twin was serendipity. I sanded them down to bare wood, a process that took about a week. The latest trend in furniture videos seems to be using a chemical stripper and then scraping off the old varnish, but I didn’t want to invest anymore in case this project turned out badly too. The process was anything but photogenic, and my fingers were practically falling off by the end. What started out as therapeutic quickly turned into a chore.

Once stained and top coated, however, the nightstands were perfect. Chairish tells me that I could probably sell them for more than $1,000. Sure, it would be a profit. But would it account for all the time I’d spent? First, the months scouring Facebook Marketplace, then the two weeks of obsessive work? And the remaining damage from the stain that I’d dripped onto my patio? My nascent repetitive use injury? No, I just wanted to keep them as a trophy for myself. 

Related Reading:

Social Media Convinced Me to Refinish a Dresser. I Lived to Tell the Tale

Can Chalk Paint Ever Be Chic?