A series of articles: how did we save up to 10% of the renovation budget by shopping online?
For the returning readers, this is the 4th piece in a series of articles about saving money by daring to buy online.
The nature of designing and renovating bedrooms, as opposed to bathrooms/kitchens, has more to do with home styling and decorating rather than hardware, lighting and plumbing fixtures.
Nevertheless, you can still save a significant amount of money, which definitely comes in handy in the period of time prior to having a child. The expenses are astronomical - medical bills, buying all the equipment needed for a newborn, and much more… any parent to be can benefit from saving money, especially on décor.
Thankfully, I’m an experienced online-shopper (not to say a shopaholic) so I suggested we apply the online shopping methods to this situation as well. we managed to save hundreds of dollars by daring to buy home styling items online, mainly from the Chinese shopping giant "Ali Express”.
The items I chose to buy online were:
Carpet - I found a design I really liked (for about half the price of locally found ones) which was very soft and high quality. From the moment it arrived our dog has been obsessed with it and keeps snuggling on it 😊
We bought the changing table 2nd hand from a mums’ group on FB, colored it so it’d match the bed’s color, and replaced the knobs and legs as well. All in all, it looks better and is way cheaper than buying a new one.
So how did we make sure the items we buy are high quality?
Up to that point I mostly bought inexpensive items (up to 10$), and now I had to develop a better verification process. I looked into items which had a lot of positive feedback (preferably ones with pictures).
I've also perfected my browsing method - if I looked for a specific style and didn’t find exactly what I wanted, I looked into similar ones' sellers and usually there I found what I was looking for. Slowly but surely, I created a collection of stores, offering the styles I liked.
Usually the first thing people ask when they hear about online shopping, is did we order EVERYTHING from Ali Express? The answer to that is, of course, no 😊
We've ordered only items which were worthwhile ordering - shipping weight and cost wise. For example, the bed, changing table, mattress etc. bought locally due to the weight and size of the items. The smaller textile and decorative items we did buy online. It's also worth mentioning, that when shopping for fabrics online (especially from china) sometimes they might have toxins residue on them, so I made sure not to buy items that my baby could put in her mouth, and made sure to laundry everything multiple times, which removes the residue. And here are the links to purchase - click on the items' name to a direct link to the seller I bought from:
3. Closet knobs
4. Bed canopy
6. carpet
Another item which is perfect for the design-aware mom to be, is this monochrome with a dash of turquoise activity gym by “crate&kids”
Want some advice with your renovation?
get in touch :)