We’ve been giving a lot of helpful hints on how to buy new low-cost or reused furnishings for your home at Realty Kitchen. However, an even better way to furnish home for low cost is to spend nothing. How can you do that? Through swap parties.
Image: Katherine Raz / Flickr
Like most people, you probably have a few pieces rattling around your house that are perfectly good as pieces, but that don’t fit into your decor. Perhaps you, on impulse, picked up some beautiful antiques on a trip in the country, but find they don’t fit into your modern furnishings. You could take these unwanted items to Goodwill or a similar charity, but a potentially more useful option for you is to organize a swap party.
There are various ways to do this, but a good swap keeps the number of participants to a limited number – less than 20, and ideally around 10-15. You are likely going to be holding the swap in someone’s house, and you don’t want people jostling and fighting over pieces.
To discourage fighting, you probably should find out how to deal with situations where two or more people want the same thing. Having people put their names down for the items they like and then drawing a name from a hat is one way to resolve these issues. To ensure that people don’t go crazy and put their name on every item, you might want to restrict the number of things they can pick to the number of things they arrived with.
And there has to be a little bit of quality control: you don’t want people bringing things they were planning on just throwing out. If items are not valuable simply as antiques, they should be fully functional. If they are clothing items, they should be unworn or capable of being appreciated as vintage (like high-end leather goods).
When the swap ends, you are likely going to have a number of pieces left over, but you shouldn’t think of this as failure. At the very least, you’ll make a few of your friends happy with some new pieces. And even if everything remains after the swap, you can still send it to charity, and you have had a fun afternoon with some friends.
Heleen Jacobsen
Broker of Record with InfoMarket Group GMAC Real Estate
www.infomarketgroup.com
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