Earlier this year, following an emotional winter and looking to shake things up in my life, I moved to a new apartment. My plan, ever since moving to a new home, was always to make a home for myself. A way to build a more solid footing in my city and a home worth coming home to.
Working as a full-time travel blogger and travel writer, having a home is so important. Even more so that we’re all stuck working from home.
Since moving into my new apartment in February, I’ve been on a design spree: browsing Pinterest endlessly and looking for random bric-a-brac to display, souvenirs from my many trips. Living in New York City for two years now, I’ve only had three apartments in which I’ve lived. Not bad, considering how frequently I changed housing when I’d moved to other new cities.
Each new apartment in Brooklyn came with its own design and layout quirks, so my furniture choices have always been more transient than I’d like. So, with this new apartment, and a new outlook on life, I knew it was time to make an investment into my own personal home decor.
I started my design process by looking for furniture and home decor websites to shop from, and was quickly overwhelmed. Google searches brought up a bunch of the staple home design websites, but it was a challenge to search through them.
At first, I was hesitant to shop from the big-box, e-commerce sites, but after hours, days, and weeks of looking online, I finally realized they pretty much had everything I wanted and needed.
Originally looking to decorate my home apartment in a mid-century modern style, I found a pretty decent variety of furniture products all within my general budget at each of the biggest home decorating websites. It shouldn’t be too surprising: with little overhead, these online shops can keep a huge variety of furniture in stock. In every style, design, size, and theme.
BUDGET HOME DECOR • APARTMENT DECOR WEBSITES
Where to Shop Online for Cool & Cheap Furniture
Just the idea of shopping online for furniture can be daunting. Measuring your home or apartment space to see what fits. Guessing the texture of the home decor. Will the blue in the sofa match the blue in the curtains?
Overstock
One of the biggest online retailers, Overstock.com sells designer brands & home goods, usually heavily discounted. There’s a huge selection of home decor, furniture, bedding, and many other closeout merchandise. Because they pretty much offer every type of home furniture and home and apartment deco products, it’s a useful one-stop shop.
REVIEW: I initially used Overstock to buy some home furniture because of a “Found Money” Deal through the Acorns app, though it looks like they’re no longer partnering together.
With their last minute sale prices, and the fact some of the pieces come pre-built, it’s a useful site for quick finds. And, actually, there are some decent designs available!
Also: Overstock sends a lot of email coupons so you can usually get extra discounts when you find the right coupon to use!
AllModern
AllModern is owned by one of the darlings of online furniture retail, Wayfair.com, but sells more unique and colorful styles. From AllModern.com, you can buy everything from bedroom and living room furniture, to funky lighting, rugs, and lots of stylish home decor pieces.
REVIEW: AllModern has a lot of fresh designs and the website just feels a lot more user-friendly with better taste than many of the other retailers. It’s a slightly more curated selection to a more millennial (and dare I say: hipster) audience.
Walmart
As one of the most popular big-box stores, it’s no surprise Walmart has a big presence online. From Walmart.com, you can buy all the usual things from the mega-retailer, but there’s also a pretty big selection of furniture and home decor.
REVIEW: With Walmart’s awful reputation for its treatment of workers, and the fact that they don’t provide benefits for their employees, I do try to avoid shopping from Walmart.com when I can.
In my experience shopping furniture online, every time I found a piece of furniture on another site, I’d search the same item on the Walmart site and about 3 out of 5 times, it would be significantly cheaper (and available!). With free shipping, it was a quick and easy way to save a few bucks.
While browsing the selection on Walmart.com might be tedious, if you find an item you like elsewhere, it’s worth checking out the price on Walmart.com, too.
Wayfair
Selling furniture and home-goods, Wayfair.com pretty much has all the home decor you might need. Part of the same family of websites which includes AllModern, Joss & Main, Birch Lane, and Perigold brands, Wayfair is probably the biggest (and, in my experience: cheapest).
REVIEW: Like Walmart, Wayfair has some serious issues with its treatment of workers. The few products I’ve gotten from Wayfair.com have been the right kind of hip style I was looking for (and on a budget!), but sometimes the quality is a little less than stellar.
Still: most of that is purely cosmetic and it’s still a useful site for browsing cool home goods, and if the deal is right: purchasing.
Amazon
Amazon sells everything, of course, and the search for furniture and home decor isn’t really well-curated, but it does have everything you could want. The furniture and home decor sections of the e-commerce site offer pretty much everything, including many Amazon-branded products.
REVIEW: I’ve bought a lot from Amazon in the past, including my bed frame and a cheap bedroom dresser. Usually, the home goods on Amazon are just quick solutions because you can generally get them delivered fast.
But, like with Walmart, it’s also helpful to search products from other sites that you find and see if they’re cheaper on Amazon. It’s an easy shopping hack.
Have any other favorite home shopping sites? There are a lot out there and these are the bigger players, and the more boutique ones tend to only have higher-priced furniture, but I’m always looking for new recommendations!