When moving an office or a home, people often need to get rid of old furniture. Sometimes it’s because a chair or a wardrobe has gotten a little old and battered, sometimes it’s because the bulkier pieces won’t fit into a new office or a new home. Sometimes it’s because the new rental apartment or house comes ready-furnished, and sometimes it’s nothing more than the desire to have more space and reduce clutter. Moving to storage is always an option but it does cost money. There are plenty of reasons to get rid of old furniture – other than leaving a lonely chair on the side of the road!
Happily, there are plenty of ways of doing it too. The classic method is the yard sale. It doesn’t take much effort, just a few posters at local stores and meeting places, and an hour or so of setting-up time. The downside is that if you don’t have a yard, it’s pretty difficult to have a yard sale. Inclement weather can cause all kinds of difficulties for those who do.
The internet gives sellers of second-hand goods access to a huge marketplace. Craigslist and eBay are just two of the options- there are dozens more national and international second-hand sales sites, and tens of thousands of more local ones. Most of them don’t charge much if anything and payments can be made quickly and easily through services like PayPal.
There are two advantages to selling online rather than holding a yard sale. The first is that you don’t need to let a crowd of strangers onto your property (there is always some degree of a security risk) and the second is that a bigger audience usually means higher prices. No matter what you’re selling, there is probably someone out there willing to pay a good price for it. The disadvantages are that you have to arrange delivery, pickup, or postage, and trust the individual at the other end of the deal. You don’t get cash for selling online.
If you’ve got a lot of items to be sold, consignment shops can be an option. In this situation, someone else will do the selling and you’ll get an agreed percentage of the proceeds. In most cases that means making less money than you otherwise could, but on the other hand, there is less work involved and the consignee will often take delivery of the items immediately.
The last option is to give away your old furniture. You won’t make any money but you might save some- there is a need to pay long-distance movers to shift things you’ve gifted to friends and family or otherwise donated. Goodwill and other major charities will often pick up furniture to save donors the trouble of delivering it.
Freecycle is another good option. It’s not so much a charity as an exchange scheme. You join the group, and can both receive notifications of things being given away in your area, and post them yourself. The aim is to reduce waste by transferring things from where they aren’t needed to where they are, as simply as possible.