Secrets of the furniture flippers: how to turn trash into treasure

Amateur furniture restoration is a social media phenomenon – with DIY enthusiasts showing how to save mid-century and other antique furnishings from the dump. A coffee table lies discarded on a grassy kerb. Thick black paint obscures how chipped and decrepit the wood underneath might be. Passing by, the best thing for it seems like the local tip. But along comes a young woman. She takes it and, with a healthy dose of sanding, stripping, wood-filling and revarnishing, turns what was a bit of street junk into a beautifully restored mid-century treasure. It’s sold on for a healthy profit.

Welcome to the world of online furniture flipping – where interiors enthusiasts show how they have transformed pieces obtained for little or no money back to their original glory. Some are so good at it, they have quit their jobs to do it full-time.

Of course, doing up old furniture is nothing new – some trace the hobby back as far as ancient Egypt, and 90s and 00s DIY shows were full of questionable “makeovers” of chests of drawers and wardrobes stripped and painted in garish colours. However, what is new is the booming business of building a social media following around it. On TikTok alone, a search for #furnitureflip pulls up nearly 800,000 posts, many with millions of views.

Part of the reason behind this is the meditative nature of the content – it’s quite addictive to watch an electric sander smoothing out a sideboard or paint peeling off in satisfying curls to expose the grain of the wood underneath. There is also climate concern: according to a 2018/19 report by the North London Waste Authority, 22m pieces of furniture are discarded each year. Fewer than one in 10 people currently attempt to repair or restore broken furniture before chucking it out.

So, how easy is it to restore and flip furniture? And how can you do it with unloved pieces found around the house or picked up secondhand? Here, the experts of Instagram and TikTok reveal all. One of Erin Shuford’s projects. The videos that most fascinate Florida-based Erin Shuford’s 1.6 million followers on Instagram are the ones of her stripping paint. “It’s an absolutely miserable process,” she says, but “everyone loves to watch it.”.

A recent find was a blue mid-century modern sideboard with “Live, Love, Laugh” stencilled on it, for which she “way overpaid” $80 (£63) on Facebook Marketplace. To remove the sickly hue, she started by using a nontoxic paint and varnish stripper. Then, she peeled off the paint in clean strokes with a metal scraper. For the more stubborn bits of paint, she used acetone and a wire bristle brush. After that, the table was sanded, a wood stain applied and it was toned. Then she sold it for $525 (£415).

Shuford is from a family of secondhand enthusiasts. “From my grandparents to my mom, we would pick stuff from the trash and make it better. We still do to this day,” she says. “Growing up, you don’t have to buy new. You can always find something at a thrift store or a charity shop.” There’s a sense of accomplishment, she says, in seeing “a piece that was slathered in paint now showing a beautiful wood grain, restored and ready to live another 50 years”.

In 2021, after the birth of her first child, Shuford turned her hobby into something more. Back then, she had an administrative job in the construction industry. “I went back to work when my daughter was just a couple of months old and I was really struggling,” she says. So she looked for ways that she could work from home. After fixing up a couple of pieces and selling them for a profit, “I had a gut feeling that this is where I was supposed to be. So I quit my job on a whim.” She has learned everything she knows from “YouTube university”, but says the most important part is working out what customers actually want to buy. Her bestsellers are sideboards and nightstands, but she won’t touch china cabinets – “They are hard to work on, they are hard to transport, they are hard to store” – or dining sets, because the amount they sell for isn’t worth the time it takes to restore them.

Shuford flips at least one piece of furniture a week, which she can sell for anything between $400 (£316) and $3,000 (£2,370). That $3,000 sale was a set of Broyhill Saga dressers bought for $250 (£198). She never dreamed that her account would become so popular but feels that if she can “help other people do what I’ve been fortunate enough to do with myself and my business, then I’m absolutely going to do it”.

Iman and a converted dresser. It was during lockdown in 2020 that Faranne Iman spotted a solid wood dresser sitting by the bins outside her neighbour’s home in St Louis, Missouri. She was too embarrassed to take it in the daylight – so she waited until dark and went back with a friend to collect it. She could tell the dresser was solid wood and in good condition, so all she had to do was clean it up. With a cheap paintbrush, she applied a new top coat of exterior paint (a rookie error: she now knows you should never use exterior paint on furniture). After listing the dresser on Facebook Marketplace, it sold for $400 (£316). “I was like, that was too easy,” she says.