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Where might you find new or used home office furniture?
I get my office furniture from a local Mom and Pop office supply store. They’re barely holding their own due to all the competition from the large corporate chain office supply store, which has moved in to the area. As such their prices are more reasonable. They also have a lot of items for a fraction of their regular price due to slight damage in moving. They call these items scratch and dents. That’s how I got my fantastic computer desk (7 feet long!) for about a third of its regular price.
As far as your needs are concerned, I’d check your local independent office supply store as well as the buy and sells, garage sales, Goodwill, Salvation Army, classified ads, estate sales, fire sales and anywhere you can check the furniture out in person before buying. You may also have something comparable to a buy and sell newspaper or magazine in your region; we have one here and there are items people are selling listed A to Z with their phone number. Check your local newsstand or library for these. You can also check local businesses where you know an employee or watch to see which companies go out of business; either might be selling old office furniture or otherwise dispensing with it. You may also find a local college or school program on furniture or cabinet making that would build something for your needs as a class project.
How do you make sure it suits your needs?
To determine what home office furniture will suit your needs you need to know the difference between what you want and what you really need. You need to take good measurements to find out what will fit in the space that you plan to use for your home office. You’ll need to establish a budget for acquiring and replacing furniture as well as for increasing needs for various furniture items. I have a computer desk, chair and a large bookshelf. I determined what I could afford before hand and was surprised to find that I could stay within my budget and get what I needed too. If your budget is tighter than mine, you can certainly get an old cafeteria table and a used office chair that will suffice early on. You can get a shelf kit you can put together instead of a finished shelf as I did. You may find you have a need for filing cabinets. Or, you may decide you can do your filing on your computer’s hard drive (or at least most of it). What ever your needs you can meet them within your budget somehow.
The best way to determine your needs after determining your budget is to decide what you have to have right now for your business to function at an optimal level. You know a need because you have had a situation where you would have been better off with the furnishing than with the money that you still do have. Once you have a list of justifiable purchases, decide how cheaply you can or might be able to get each. Shop around to set these prices. Now order the items by the urgency or importance that they should be purchased and purchase them in that order until your home office furniture budget runs dry.
How do you get it at a price you can afford?
Getting items at the price you can afford depends largely on where you buy and what quality you are willing to accept. A cafeteria table at a junkyard or the Goodwill is going to be cheaper than a brand new computer desk anywhere. A wooden chair is cheaper than a cushioned swivel office chair. How long can you afford to wait for what you need to get what you really want in quality? How soon will you be able to afford the price of an upgrade in quality?
When buying ask for a discounted price. All any sane salesperson should do is to say “no”. Of course, if you come from my neck of the woods you can get almost any imaginable or unimaginable response to such a request and certainly something much worse than just a “no”, so do use your own best judgment. A good way to justify a discount is to point out some flaw or to mention that you might be interested if it were a different color or size or of a different material construction.
Don’t forget about payment plans. Many stores have payment plans or layaway, some also have free delivery on scratch and dent items like that local independent office supply store I use. Don’t forget to search online classifieds or business related message boards (now commonly referred to as forums) that might have items listed or where you might find some hard answers on the best prices. This way you’ll know when to wait a little longer to buy at the right price instead of the sky-high price.
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