Save £40k furnishing your house

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The Ockwell-Smith family spent eighteen months buying on eBay to furnish and decorate their 300 year old cottage and saved thousands of pounds in the process.

When they moved into their new home in December 2005 and with three children they couldn’t face traipsing around shops searching for everything from beds to tables, lights to ornaments and even a firegrate and dishwasher. Since then they’ve had another baby and shopping became even more tiresome.

Their total spending on eBay came to £8,067 but they estimate to buy everything new on the high street would have set them back a cool fifty thousand pounds!

For large items they searched locally so that they could collect their purchases, everything else came by mail or courier.

This family is no stranger to shopping online, they even arranged the purchase of the house itself though an online property website. If you want to see the full list of everything they bought on eBay it’s on thisismoney.co.uk

5 Responses

  1. Finding items locally is a great way to save big money on large items – because the buying market is reduced to the local area, the final selling prices are much lower.

    I use https://www.localbargainfinder.co.uk to search for items near my postcode in the UK, but there is also a link to a similar tool to search the US and in Australia by zip code.

    My best bargain to date is a Black & Decker HedgeClipper that had been used about 4 times – RRP £89, I paid £1.27!!!

  2. Buying stuff on eBay is great if you want to save money, and don’t mind spending more time on it. Like most things it is a money vs time thing. I have bought some great furniture on eBay but it has taken me ages to get what I wanted at the right price

  3. Using the advanced search for me is a nigtmare, as I have two of the highest volume sellers pretty much on my doorstep. If I search by postcode, I have to filter through about 30,000 DVD and memory card listings!

    http://www.localbargainfinder.co.uk specifically finds the items marked as non-postage.

  4. Steve using search you don’t see *everything*. You only see the items that would be shown up in your search. Have a look at the one above I did for a lawn mower, there ain’t no DVD’s or Memory cards there.

    As for the search on your link it’s not that great as it simply searches eBay for items the seller has typed “collection only”, “pick up only” or “pickup only” into the description. If the seller is using eBay correctly the shipping information will be in the “Postage and packing” section local collection items will be totally missed.

    Personally I’d rather stick with a valid eBay search than a third party application that will miss half the items I’m potentially interested in 😀

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