Furnishing a living space should be fun and affordable. It’s a chance to develop and represent personal style and explore creativity. It’s not necessary to sacrifice fashion and quality for affordability. Thrifting is an exciting, and often affordable, way to curate your dream home.

Everyone has a different budget and quality standard for the furniture they bring into their home, but there are plenty of options for thrifting furniture items. You can buy what’s most convenient and inexpensive; purchase fancier and more expensive pieces from consignment stores; or hunt for good quality, older pieces that need a bit of fixing up. 

It can take extra time and patience, but it’s possible to find quality pieces on a tight budget. 

Assess the Market

Shopping around is essential for smart thrifting. Thrift stores, garage sales and estate sales are good places to look. Prices vary greatly and are inconsistent, so exploring your options is a great way to learn how much different pieces are worth, says Jane Gilbert, owner of Edgewater Furniture and Mattress in Eugene.

Determine if it’s Worth it

The very first thing to consider while looking at a piece is, according to George Ayres, owner of Eugene-based furniture maker Brockway Ayres, “Do you like the way it looks?” Then determine if it feels solid, and make sure any drawers or cabinets move well and fit right. Rolling drawers are a sign of cheaply made furniture, but fitted wood drawers indicate good quality, Ayres says.

It should “feel like it’s durable and will last another 20 years,” Ayres says. 

If you love a piece, but it needs some TLC, it’s worth trying to fix up. With some elbow grease almost anything can be restored, he says. The most important thing is that the piece has good bones because there are different options for restoring it, including painting and applying different finishes.

You can’t go wrong buying anything pre-1980s, even if it’s a basic red oak, says Sean Cleveland, owner of Northwest Modern, a mid-century modern and vintage home furnishing shop. “Aesthetically they’re not, you know, super pretty, but they’re solid wood,” he says.

Steer clear of furniture made in the ’90s and early 2000s, it tends to be poor quality and hard to refinish, Cleveland says. Furniture made in the ’90s is usually easy to identify. It will have a sticker on the bottom or a tag sewn into the cushion with a manufacture date, he says. 

When to Walk Away

The biggest downside to thrifting furniture is the mystery of its life before. Beware of smells, bugs and mold with second-hand furniture. The “sniff test” is a good way to determine if an upholstered piece of furniture is beyond a simple cleaning. If the cushions have zippers, look inside for signs of mold, bugs or water damage, Cleveland says. 

Sometimes furniture is donated to a store after being outside or in a garage. To check dressers, which are especially likely to grow mold, take the drawers out and look for signs in the interior. If there’s white mildew, it can be cleaned easily with bleach. Walk away from anything with black mold, it can cause serious health problems, Cleveland says.

Thrift stores like St. Vincent de Paul and Goodwill are good places to look, but Cleveland says sometimes they overcharge. St. Vincent carries new, factory model furniture that is decent quality, but overpriced, in Cleveland’s view. 

Furniture prices vary greatly, but a good quality dresser should be around $75 or $100. Facebook Marketplace often has amazing pieces of furniture at fair prices.

Cleaning and Refinishing

If you’re buying a piece that needs fixing up, be honest with yourself about if you’re actually going to put in the work or if it’s going to sit in your garage for years, Gilbert says. 

Replacing the fabric and cushions of upholstered furniture can be costly. If the piece only needs a surface level clean, an at-home cleaning device will do the trick. Cleveland recommends the Bissell Little Green portable carpet and upholstery cleaner, which is around $100.

Use a rag or regular household sponge, Dawn dish soap and warm water to gently scrub a wood item, but dry it quickly to prevent damaging the finish. If something has a small blemish, a quick and easy remedy is using Watco Danish Oil and very fine, 0000 grade steel wool to blend in any missing finish. 

If you want to refinish a wood piece, you’ll need to sand it down first, but be careful not to do too much. It can be easy to damage wood while sanding, Ayres says. Before refinishing anything, do your research and don’t hesitate to ask for help. Refinishing is a science, Cleveland says. 

If you don’t want to deal with the messy parts of second-hand furniture, buying from consignment is generally straightforward. Fine Consign on West 7th Avenue carries beautiful pieces that look brand new. Cleveland recommends The Vintage Industry and Time Travelers Antique Mall — both in Springfield — for vintage and antique furniture.

Finding furniture you love within your budget takes patience, and sometimes some elbow grease, but discovering the perfect piece is a euphoric experience. Seeing your personal style reflected in your home is essential for loving the space, so when it feels overwhelming, take it one step at a time. The work will be worth it.  

Brockway Ayres is at 3265 Harris Street. Find more information at BrockwayAyres.com, @brockwayayres on Instagram or by calling 541-510-7614; Edgewater Furniture and Mattress is at 155 Division Avenue. Find more information at EdgewaterFurniture.com or by calling 541-484-1962; Find more about Northwest Modern at NorthwestModern.shop.com, on Instagram @northwestmodern or by emailing nwmodernshop@gmail.com.